Software As She’s Developed

Wolf Logan’s talking about paleosocial patterns (TOOLS Web 2.0 Patterns workshop). Very cool. Marking - making permanent, public, marks. Dog marking its territory, “I was here” graffiti. e.g. blog comments, forums, guestbooks. Being obnoxious gets the comment noticed more. Pointing - indicating resources to others, can be with opinions. Reputation will dictate how much people care. e.g. Reviewing/rating sites, Digg. Competing - comparing […]

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We’ve done a little group exercise at the TOOLS web 2.0 patterns workshop. Designing a video website, with heavy emphasis on mashing up, e.g. show videos from youtube, grab recommendations from netflix, grab friend lists from Facebook, etc. Here’s the full feature list (click for full image): And the design: We eventually identified features, at back end and […]

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I have the honour of delivering a keynote at the Tools Europe conference in Zurich next week, as well as at the “Mining Web 2.0 Patterns” workshop, which, as you can tell from its title, I’m looking forward to participating in. The workshop chairs are Dragos Manolescu and Joe Yoder. The keynote is on OpenSocial, Gadgets, […]

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“The novel’s success brought the term “pollyanna” (along with the adjective “pollyannaish” and the noun “Pollyannaism”) into the language to describe someone who is cheerfully optimistic and who always maintains a generous attitude toward the motives of other people. It also became, by extension – and contrary to the spirit of the book – a […]

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Jeff Attwood recently pointed out the difference between Gamma et al’s Design Patterns and Alexanders’ equivalent and outlined a critique of the former which characterises it as “replacing actual thought and insight with a plodding, mindless, cut-and-paste code generation template mentality”. First, I want to note that the critique above surely defies belief to anyone who […]

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Stream-of-consciousness thoughts on patterns - where we’re at in 2007. Not a tutorial. Definitely not a tutorial. Where did patterns come from? Not GoF, not Alexander. Alexander, patterns, and architecture. Patterns in the organisation - how can a pattern language pervade an organisation and help workers carry out its mission statement and operating principles? Different high level patterns […]

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Ajax Design Patterns is Book of the Month in this month’s .Net mag (p.23, Issue 155, October, 2006). Incidentally, the mag is about the ‘Net, not specifically MS .Net (which it pre-dates). The review says: So AJAX might be the hottest thing in programming since, er, ordinary Javascript, but it’s no good just learning how to […]

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When people talk about their favourite benefit of Rails over framework X in language Y, they’ll usually mention ActiveRecord, Ajax support, etc. But at a deeper level, the thing that really stands out is that Rails is opinonated software. This is where Rails derives its power and agility. It’s pretty well-understood in software that consistency trumps […]

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You know AjaxPatterns? It’s a wiki about Ajax. Anyway, it’s now fully open for editing, but I’ll post more about that later. Right now, this post covers a particular pattern that’s been sitting in eXtreme Stub mode for some time, and has now got a little flesh to it. Pseudo-Multithreading (mmmm…just rolls off the tongue) is […]

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I’ve been blabbing on about how I’m going to open up the AjaxPatterns wiki for as long as it’s been online (about a year), blah blah, talk is cheap. Anyway, it’s a few steps closer now. The main issue has been protection against spam - some entrepeneurial folks behind numerous proxies have discovered there’s a […]

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