Software As She’s Developed

Confirming that enterprise reuse can be a bit of a joke at times, Jason Gorman shares this fable on enterprise reuse (via another inspired Jason). Short summary: Two ladies could save 8 cents by boiling tea in the same kettle. But the cunning analyst forgets that, since they live 20 miles from each other, there […]

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Welcome to Ye Olde Ajax Patterns Podcaste, the final in this series that began twelve months ago. 3+4+4+1 = 12 podcasts in all, covering 71 patterns (the 70 patterns in the the book as well as Dyanmic Favicons). Find them all on the podcast category - http://www.softwareas.com/category/podcast/ or subscribe to the podcast feed at http://www.softwareas.com/podcast/rss2. Thanks […]

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Dion posted a story about Nokia's new mobile widgets. This will be very cool if it's as good as it sounds. However, what got me was the XML-based config - three separate files for config, skin, and widgets. The widget config: PLAIN TEXTXML: <widget name="Example widget" version="0.1">     <info>     <creator>       <user>username</user>       <date>7.6.2006 12:00</date>   [...]

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Nate's talking about functional specs. How much doco happens on a project is one part opinion and one part "what do you want to optimise for?". I generally find there's a dichotomy in attitude to software documentation. 1. Definitive (aka normative, exhaustive, complete, bureaucratic, rigourous, formal). The ideal here is that everything should be covered in documentation [...]

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Cool! The Best Practices/Processes Patterns are now complete. They are the final eight Ajax Patterns for now - "final" in the sense of "the list is not yet finalised". The patterns had been sitting there unattended for about four months now. More details on the new patterns later, but here's a quick summary ... First, there's a [...]

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Agile is a big theme these days. Not surprising that it should be a big part of "Web 2.0", since Web 1.0 is often attributed as an inspiration. Paul Scrivens reminds us of 37Signals' association with agile principles. Similarly, the agile manifesto was mentioned in a Web Essentials talk last week (I think Kelly Goto's [...]

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