Thomas and Mary Poppendieck are to Lean Product Development (for Software) what Charles and Ray Eames are to design. LPD can be considered the project management aspect of Agile, to complement the software engineering practices of, e.g., Behavior-Driven Development. Some of my favorite essays from their website are: Train-Wreck Management The Challenges of Bringing Lean... Continue Reading →
ActiveResource: The RESTful standard
One of the coolest if under-hyped features of RESTful Ruby on Rails is ActiveResource. This allows you to treat any other RESTful Rails app as a database backend, providing an ActiveRecord like object model for abstracting that web service.Though changing slightly for Rails 2.0 (to use "/" instead of ";" as a parameter separator), this is becoming the de-facto standard for... Continue Reading →
Rohit’s SynOA takes the “Sin” out of SOA
Many years ago, my buddy Rohit Khare introduced me to a guy named Roy Fielding, and tried to explain how this whole web services thing was going in completely the wrong direction. To be honest, I didn't understand what the big deal was, particularly since I wasn't really working with those technologies. Alas, neither did... Continue Reading →
It’s the System, Stupid
A brilliant essay by my new favorite website, on Lean Software Development.Which is more important - process or people? It helps if we trade in the overloaded word "process" and use "system."In the article "Managing a Living System, not a Ledger" H. Thomas Johnson says "Managers at Toyota believe that improving the system is the... Continue Reading →
LOP-ing Off Language-Oriented Programming
I've been fascinated by Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) and metaprogramming for a while (particularly in Ruby), but just encountered the larger concept of Language-Oriented Programming (LOP). As someone who's been an OOP weenie since the late 1980's, I am intrigued by the question whether LOP and Language-Driven Development (LDD) will prove to be a similarly transformational... Continue Reading →
Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell
[More unedited notes from OSCON] Nested Data Parallelism in Haskell by Simon Peyton-JonesAppeared in the mid-1990's, but not yet available in a mainstream language. cf. Flat data parallel (MPI, map/reduce, *C, OpenMP) -> chunking mechanism (not "N" threads) -> great for distributed memory systems (MPI) "do X to A[i]" X is sequential in NDP, X... Continue Reading →
Eben Moglen: Public Policy in the “Free” World
Yesterday Eben Moglen made headlines during the O'Reilly Radar at OSCON with a (somewhat) surprising attack on "Open Source" in general, and (more surprisingly) Tim O'Reilly in particular: Eben Moglen Wacks Tim O'ReillyEben Moglen Challenges Tim O'Reilly to Join the ConversationEben Moglen Berates Open SourceToday Eben had the stage to himself, to share his thoughts... Continue Reading →
Sproutin’ Ideas
I had the pleasure of recently meeting Charles Jolley, best known for his work as CEO of Sproutit. This gave birth to a hot new JavaScript framework/Rails plug-in known as Sproutcore, which for some reason never showed up on the Google searches. Hopefully this blog post will help raise its profile. 🙂
Authentic Storytelling on the Inside
In my hero Seth Godin's book All Marketers are Liars, he describes the power of authentic stories in the context of outbound communication. Stephen Denning (formerly of the World Bank) brings that same perspective to internal communication in The Leader's Guide to Storytelling. He not only shows how the power of authentic narrative can bring about... Continue Reading →
Dips, Dead Ends, Joyrides, Lotteries, and Quests
Like everyone else there, I really enjoyed Seth Godin's visit to Silicon Valley to discuss his new book "The Dip". Not only is he a fantastic speaker, his idea of combining 5 free books and a talk for $50 worked brilliantly, in that I somehow managed to feel like I got both for free. :-)... Continue Reading →
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