Software As She’s Developed

I find Vim easiest for browsing source and as I explore TiddlyWiki, I decided to use some fairly recent Vim features - vertical splitting and the explorer window. Combined, these give you the feeling you’re an 1988 edition of Eclipse. Just like a modern IDE, but navigation is ten times faster. Here’s the macro - which […]

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Walking through Tiddlywiki source (write-up to follow), I noticed some interesting code in TiddlyWiki.js, importTiddlyWiki function. The code takes a string and injects into an IFrame. I had talked to Jon a little while ago about a similar problem and was wondering about it ever since. The technique here looks like this: It wraps the text with [...]

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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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Coding Standards, Software ... because they are dogmatic. Coding guidelines are just fine, but coding standards imply: There will be an automated tool that checks your conformity to guidelines, leading to (a) inability to check in your code; (b) public shame; (c) much head-banging on keyboards A smug sense of unjustified satisfaction from the [...]

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Andy Hunt asked a while ago, What happens when t approaches 0?" One of the interesting topics that came up today at Software Trends was “what happens when the time to develop a new application approaches zero?” It will never be zero, of course, but it will, over time, asymptotically approach zero. Suppose we finally get to [...]

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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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It started with this Code Craft blog post on the Code Garden - an analogy that sucked less. It got me thinking and ranting about metaphors in software and metaphors of software. Designing your technical architecture with software, the XP "Metaphor" practice, metaphors for HCI, metaphors like those used in the Head First series and [...]

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  Just discovered Ajax Design Patterns has received the 2006 Editor's Choice Award from Linux Journal for books on software development. It's a personal honour, but it's also a sign of the groundbreaking role Ajax has played in 2006. Ajax Design Patterns, published by O'Reilly, assumes that you have a good idea of how HTTP, HTML, the [...]

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This is the third in the four-part series on Ajax functionality and usability patterns (Book: Part 4, pp 327-530). An audio discussion of visual effects is ideally short and sweet, so this podcast is but 13 minutes long. This 13-minute podcast covers ten patterns of Ajax Architecture (Book: Chapter 16, pp 445-472): One-Second Spotlight One-Second Mutation One-Second Motion Highlight Listen Now: [...]

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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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