We’re currently evaluating candidates for replacing CVS as a lot of shops are doing. That’s not an easy job - Subversion has horrible merging support, Arch often makes simple things hard (so needs padding in shell scripts, probably), and I’m not sure that I want Darcs because I’m not sure that I can patch a […]

One of the things I do when starting a job, especially when it’s different enough from the previous job, is read up. As the current job at Speurders.nl is more a people job than a technology job, one of the books I’m re-reading is Peopleware by Tom DiMarco and Timothy Lister.
Peopleware is in […]

Ralph Johnson pointed to Pair Programming With The Users on the VWNC mailing list. It is indeed an interesting article, discussing two of my favorite topics: comparing software with other endaveours, and discussing how to build better software.
I am tempted to give a long and detailed analysis of the article, but it is Sunday, […]

Michael Robertson, of MP3.com and LindowsLinspire fame, keeps looking around for the Next Big Thing™.
This time, he thinks he has found it in ajaxWrite, the first of a suite of AJAX-based web applications. As the name says, ajaxWrite is a word processor. Simple, but functional so it might be enough for a large number […]

In Gosling Didn’t Get The Memo a statement by James Gosling that is too dumb to be true (but alas, it is) is dissected. Along the way, the article churns out a very long list of links to sites and blog posts containing ammo for fighting the Java crowd (and their associates over at C# […]

The sole reason I’m still keeping an eye on Java is called Jini. It’s an exceptional piece of work, which for a change leverages Java features instead of battling them. Clean and concise interfaces, very well thought-out functionality with an experienced team that managed to resist feature creep, showing that even in Java it is […]

Ajax is getting hyped to the point where it isn’t healthy anymore. On the squeak-dev mailing list, Brad Fuller asks about Seaside, Ruby and Ajax. My response:
“Seaside includes Ajax-y things - you can do asynchronous processing without writing a single line of Javascript.
(In fact, I used ‘Ajax’ in a VAST WebConnect project, and […]

My notebook came preinstalled with Norton Internet Security. I’m lazy, so I left it on.
Last Friday afternoon, I implemented some javascript hooks for the designers (I’m working on a project where we manage to separate implementation and design quite well, most with CSS, but I also have a couple of JS hooks for them). […]

Wilkes Joiner posted a screencast showing off debugging in Seaside. For those that haven’t been exposed to the Smalltalk way of web development, this could be a bit of an eye opener…
Anecdotical evidence suggests that the more experienced a Smalltalk developer is, the more code (proportionally) is written inside the debugger. It’s just so much […]

Blaine Buxton goes off on a bit of a rant about XP Mantras. He is right, but for the wrong reason.
XP, if you study it carefully, is a very carefully tuned and balanced web of forces and counterforces. And, in my experience, it only works well (but then extremely well) iff everything is taken into […]