Recently I was co-lecturing a workshop about web application developement with CouchDB. The event took place in the scope of a Summer University, which explicitly claims to provide a setting for lecturers to improve and to try out experimental teaching concepts.
Apart from simply distributing the share of work and apart from parallelizing preparation as well as oral presentation, my impression is that lecturing in pairs has positive side effects similiar to pair programming: >> more…
On Monday, I started working on a new product (well, the product is not new, I only joined) and it’s neither Java nor Grails, but .NET. Which means working with a new (also not new, but I haven’t used in in ten years) OS, a new IDE, new team, new code, …
Luckily, there’s ReSharper, a great tool for visual studio, that let’s me use all the shortcuts I know from IntelliJ IDEA.
But as all the rest is so new and exciting, be prepared for a lot of beginner’s posts about C#, Team Foundation Server, working off-site and alike.
As only few developers and few architects might know, the idea of design patterns – popular in computer sciences – originates from the playground of architecture and built environment. It was Christopher Alexander with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein who wrote “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” in 1977. In this book they describe patterns extracted from the rich (european) architectural history and how to apply them to current problems. Each pattern consists of a description of the problem, a sketch of the prototypical situation, a solution and a reference to related problems. Exactly the same way as the Gang of Four adapted it for problems in computer science in their book “Design Patterns. Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software” in 1994. Apart from the formal characteristics in both areas the idea of design patterns produces an answer to the same question: how to transfer previous experiences into productive sources of knowledge? >> more…
Me and its godparents from conject proudly introduce the little sibling of our first baby. Parents always love to show around the achievements of their little geniuses and make big plans for their future – so do we. Wassily (named after his famous Bauhaus role model) is really good with colors. For now his drawings decorate my fridge only and conjects Munic office, but thats where all artists start their carrier, right? Soon after he has learned some basic rules of composition, we will start preparing the portfolio for his college of art application. Some time you’ll wish you had snatched some of his early work.
Last Saturday I visitied decoded, a conference dedicated to the beautiful things one can do with code. Topics ranged from art projects over open source hardware to more serious topics like visualization of data.
All talks were awesome (and I totally want an arduino for Christmas), but the one that kept me researching and having new ideas was the one of Moritz Stefaner about visualizing information. He has some really inspiring websites (here and here). I especially liked his contribution to the book “Dynamic Taxonomies and Faceted Search” – it’s about search, visualization and it even has formulas. What more could one want? >> more…
We recently closed our offshore development office in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We had a great team there but weren’t able to integrate them well enough into the processes here in Munich. As we had no plans to grow the office in SPB significantly and we only had four guys there, we were stuck in the middle. The team was too small to be self sustainable, especially with regard to offering everybody a clear track for personal development.
So after almost a year of agonizing and sometimes just deferring the issue, at the start of this year we together with the team decided to close the office. Everybody had almost nine months of warning to look for a new job. Plus we created an attractive termination package to make sure that all the young families that had sprung up around our team there were provided for. >> more…
I have always had the feeling that industrial processes are a bad metaphor for software development.
If creating software were like producing cars, then more people would mean more output. Somehow I have never seen that work. Ever since Fred Brooks it’s been accepted fact that there is a diminishing returns curve we are on in adding people to a project. I was surprised when I found this blog post that showed that research indicated that the optimum productivity is actually at very small team sizes (actually 4.6)
If you are a real developer you most likely have already been in a situation, where a group was welcomed with the phrase hey guys – on IRC, mailing lists or even in personal talk. Some of you might share the experience to not feel being addressed by this salutation. This situations leave me personally a little angry, because I don’t like to be ignored. As I am a calm and non-aggressive person my usual reaction is to just ignore the speaker as well and to behave as if the salutation didn’t take place (as if nobody talked to me). Unfortunately this way most people won’t notice they did something wrong, because they really aren’t aware of the exclusive nature of their language. >> more…
Neither does 37signals: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20100601/never-read-another-resume.html
The code candidates send us is much more interesting than the typical alphabet soup project listings you normally find in developer resumes (“worked on XML/SOAP/J2EE/AOP project using Oracle, IntelliJ, Java 1.6 and Rational Rose”)
Typically we can tell just from the code if we want to hire somebody. The interview is typically to check for cultural fit. And most people we hire spend a day here working with us. In the last two years we only had one false positive, whom we had to let go during the initial months.
Do you love to be surrounded by as much and good as possible technical equipment or do you prefer to sit in a group of at least three peers discussing a detail no matter how small the screen is? And what do you like about your favourite setting? In our team both work modes coexist peacefully completing each other and also the happy medium (2:2) can be observed sometimes – and of course also the small screens are of high quality.
