As the underlying tech becomes a commodity, design emerges as the answer. The technology industry is undergoing a creative transformation.
A large amount of value is shifting from the development of underlying technologies — the infrastructure, the platforms, the chips, the radios, the hardware — to the design of how technology interacts with the user. This tectonic creative shift will determine many of tomorrow’s tech winners and losers. How Facebook Ships Code « FrameThink. I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates.
It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software. Seems like others are also interested in Facebook… The company’s developer-driven culture is coming under greater public scrutiny and other companies are grappling with if/how to implement developer-driven culture. The company is pretty secretive about its internal processes, though. Facebook’s Engineering team releases public Notes on new features and some internal systems, but these are mostly “what” kinds of articles, not “how”… So it’s not easy for outsiders to see how Facebook is able to innovate and optimize their service so much more effectively than other companies.
HUGE thanks to the many folks who helped put together this view inside of Facebook. Notes: The Decline and Fall of Agile. It's odd to talk about the decline and fall of the agile movement, especially now that it's so popular, but I actually think the agile movement has been in decline for several years now.
The State of the Art I've seen a shift in my business over the last few years. In the beginning, people would call me to help them introduce Agile, and I would sell them a complete package that included agile planning, cross-functional teams, and agile engineering practices. Now many people who call me already have Agile in place (they say), but they're struggling. They're having trouble meeting their iteration commitments, they're experiencing a lot of technical debt, and testing takes too long. Other consultants I've talked to report the same experience.
The Role of Scrum Scrum is undeniably the winner of the agile method wars. But because Scrum works in short cycles and doesn't include any engineering practices, it's very easy for teams using Scrum to throw out design. Features that slow a website down... Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today’s Velocity Conference.
The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are most important. ... aren't feature at all. Today representatives of Google Search and Microsoft’s Bing teams, Jake Brutlag and Eric Schurman respectively, presented the results of user performance tests at today’s Velocity Conference.
The talk was entitled The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. These are long-term tests were designed to see what aspects of performance are most important. Software Architecture Visualizations : un album. Asshole driven development. Some say it’s immaturity: that software is still a young industry and all the change is the path to some true fundamentals.
It's not a promise, it's a guess. “When is it going to be done?”
Is a reasonable question and we as software developers should try to come up with the best answer we can based on our experience and analysis. What we should not do, however, is treat our answer as solemn oath. When you treat estimates as promises instead of guesses, you bind your worth as a worker to it. 'Drastic' Digg overhaul could 'shock' users, says Kevin Rose - T. Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineerin. Frequently Forgotten Fundamental Facts about Software Engineering Robert L.
Glass This month's column is simply a collection of what I consider to be facts—truths, if you will—about software engineering. I'm presenting this software engineering laundry list because far too many people who call themselves software engineers, or computer scientists, or programmers, or whatever nom du jour you prefer, either aren't familiar with these facts or have forgotten them. Disqus Forks Into Two Products, Launches Revamped Real-Time Comm.
Only a month after rival comment system JS-Kit launched Echo, a real-time comment system, Disqus is striking back with its biggest upgrade since the service launched.
Along with a revamped comment system, Disqus 3.0 is also what CEO Daniel Ha calls a “conceptual reconstruction” for the service: Disqus will now be split into two separate but complimentary products, called Comments and Profiles, in recognition of the way two distinct sets of users have been using the commenting engine. For those who just got worried about losing the Disqus they know and love, fear not: the service isn’t changing all that much. The Comments product has been revamped, but it’s still the commenting engine that bloggers can embed using a few lines of Javascript (we’ve embedded the new comment system below this post if you’d like to try it out for yourself).
Profiles isn’t yet another social network you have to maintain. In terms of actually commenting, the new system has a lot in common with Echo. Chrome_Release_Cycle.