Group items tagged

"Fixed price contracts are evil - this is what can often be heard from agilists. On the other hand those contracts are reality which many agile teams have to face. But what if we try to tame it instead of fighting against it? How can a company execute this kind of contract using agile practices to achieve better results with lower risk? This article will try to answer those questions."

"Modern business relies on multitasking to get work done. Employees are evaluated on their ability to multitask. IT professionals are routinely assigned to multiple projects. Did we always do this? Does multitasking work? What are the real impacts of multitasking? Is there an alternative?"

" A number of commentators have been talking about the perceived dichotomy between Agile techniques and architectural thinking. In the Agile world architecture is often perceived as BDUF (Big Up Front Design) and as a result is frequently overlooked or delayed in the spirit of "YAGNI" (You ain't gonna need it)."

" Sadek Drobi talks about abstracting the control syntax (glue), giving examples from mainstream and FP languages: Null, propagating errors, events, asynchronous programming, lists, streams, channels, functors, monads, and custom abstractions. "

"We can query an application's state to find out the current state of the world, and this answers many questions. However there are times when we don't just want to see where we are, we also want to know how we got there."

" Ian Robinson considers that programming for the web requires a different architectural approach than for applications: clients are interested only in URIs, clients are responsible for the integrity of a sequence of requests, and one should implement application protocols as protocol resources , not domain resources. "

"After I graduated from the HIO Enschede (B.Sc level) in '94 I have worked with a lot of different platforms and environments: from 4GL's like System Builder, uniVerse and Magic to C++ on AIX to Java to Perl on Linux to C# on .NET. All these platforms and environments had one thing in common: their creators were convinced their platform was the best and greatest and easiest to write software with. To some extend, each and every one of them were decent platforms and it was perfectly possible to write software with them though I'll leave the classification whether they were / are the greatest and easiest to the reader. I'll try to make clear below why this dull intro is important. "

"If you have been following my blog, my company or my twitter page then you probably know that my startup - yonkly - was built with ASP.NET MVC. In this post, I will talk about how I scale deploy Yonkly very easily."

"There are some attractive Adobe Flash based solutions for this type of UI component, and while JavaScript versions exist (see this and this), the commercial Flash products tend to have better aesthetics and polish. To redress the balance in JavaScript's favour, I have created this jQuery carousel plugin."

"I'm passionate about Domain Driven Design (DDD). Like many experienced object modellers, I was practicing this long before Eric Evans coined that specific term, though I have sinced learned some useful specific patterns from his book. To me, DDD is about two things: focussing on the business functionality rather than on the technical implementation; and focussing on building a good model of the business domain rather than just on the specific immediate requirements. Like many others, I perceived that the key to this was to model the domain as behaviourally-complete domain objects: to actively resist the tendency to separate business functionality from the persistent domain entities."

"Pretotyping [pree-tuh-tahy-ping], verb: Testing the initial appeal and actual usage of a potential new product by simulating its core experience with the smallest possible investment of time and money. Less formally, pretotyping is a way to test a product idea quickly and inexpensively by creating extremely simplified versions of that product to help validate the premise that "If we build it, they will use it.""

"When people invent or improve significantly new services or technologies, they are in general focused on their domains (especially software vendors who are tempted to cater to their market first). Cloud computing is no exception. IBM, For example, defines the Rainmaker technology as software and hardware that work together to help enterprises create clouds. And, as usual, the devil lives in the details, and software and hardware will work together in a very proprietary way."

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" Martin Thompson and Michael Barker talk about building a HPC financial system handling over 100K tps at less than 1ms latency by having a new approach to infrastructure and software. Some of the tips include: understand the platform, model the domain, create a clear separation of concerns, choose data structures wisely, and run business logic on a single thread. "

" In this interview Ryan discusses Clojure with author Chris Houser. They cover Clojure's approach to classes, comparing and contrasting it with Java. Chris delves into they type of programming problem sets Clojure is best suited for, especially in relation to parallelism as the number of cores in computers increases and Clojure's applicability as or research language. "

" Billy Newport explains the fundamental differences between SQL and NoSQL, creating awareness that NoSQL is not suited for many cases, and people should make informed decisions before buying into it. "

"The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. While I've participated in lots of discussions online about MVVM, it occurred to me that beginners who are learning the pattern have very little to go on and a lot of conflicting resources to wade through in order to try to implement it in their own code. I am not trying to introduce dogma but wanted to pull together key concepts in a single post to make it easy and straightforward to understand the value of the pattern and how it can be implemented. MVVM is really far simpler than people make it out to be. "

"The purpose of this post is to provide an introduction to the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern. While I've participated in lots of discussions online about MVVM, it occurred to me that beginners who are learning the pattern have very little to go on and a lot of conflicting resources to wade through in order to try to implement it in their own code. I am not trying to introduce dogma but wanted to pull together key concepts in a single post to make it easy and straightforward to understand the value of the pattern and how it can be implemented. MVVM is really far simpler than people make it out to be. "

" I've been hearing from people that have had a great deal of success using the Domain Event pattern and the infrastructure I previously provided for it in Domain Events - Take 2. I'm happy to say that I've got an improvement that I think you'll like. The main change is that now we'll be taking an approach that is reminiscent to how events are published in NServiceBus."

"SourceMaking - is the best information source on the Web on such software development topics as design patterns, refactoring and UML. A lot of information freely available through the site's pages, so feel free to use bookmarklet to leave interesting chapters for further reading. You may start browsing the site by following one of these topics:"

" Guy L. Steele Jr. believes that it should not be the programmer's job to think about parallelism, but languages should provide ways to transparently run tasks in parallel. This requires a new approach in building languages supporting algorithms built on independence and build-and-conquer principles rather than on linear decomposition of problems. "