WorkerBee

What big companies use it primarily?

Banks - their back-end processing is often in Java.

Laying off people who weren't and aren't contributing anything productive

Saying that UK public services are inefficient is one thing, probably true.

Saying that the layoffs can be confined to people who "aren't contributing anything productive" and be extension health, policing, education, research etc will not get worse at all is an entirely different thing, and I don't think it's true.

I totally agree with your analysis of how the UK got into the current mess. That doesn't really say anything about the best way out of it.

Well, the UK is currently testing the opposite ridiculous notion - that by laying off lots of government workers (when there already lots of people looking for jobs), reducing benefits to everyone (which hits the poor far harder, of course), and cutting funding to education and research, you'll somehow help the country recover from a recession faster and better.

You'd have to know all the other frameworks in order to know that yours is simpler.

How many frameworks is the right number? One is too few. One hundred is too many, it will just fragment people's skills.

Experimentation and inventing your own wheel is good for learning. But most of the time those wheels shouldn't see a wider audience - unless they have something new to offer.

One unanswered question:

What specifically does this project bring that isn't present in ASP.NET MVC, OpenRasta, FubuMVC or MonoRail?

Or that couldn't have been achieved by porting one of those to Mono (if they aren't there already)?

So, when Gates bought 150M of Apple stock in 97, was he betting against himself?

Pretty much, yes. It made him seem like less of a monopolist.

Worked out to be a winning bet for Gates.

That's what happens when you bet on every horse in the race. It's something that Microsoft does a lot.

Are you in the business of writing software that never gets used? I have, and I hated it. Quick feedback means quickly finding out if you're building the right thing.

there is a lot of anger towards the agile movement because it was sold as a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose, rather than a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility.

the interesting thing is that the agile movement started as exactly the reverse of what you said: as a grassroots movement among engineers that embraced flexibility, not a tool to pointy haired bosses to impose.

If your experience is the opposite, you've been had by someone, and you're blaming agile.

whenever unit tests or test driven development comes up the proponents act like anyone not doing things this way is incompetent. I think the reverse is true

The reverse would be "anyone doing unit tests in incompetent", which is not a defendable statement. What are you trying to say?

Looks like in cases like that the bug tracker is making the underlying problems more visible. In that case, removing the bug tracker is not the way forward.

A bet on Gates is not a bet against Jobs.

Yes it was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh

"The first Macintosh was introduced on January 24, 1984; it was the first commercially successful personal computer to feature a mouse and a graphical user interface rather than a command-line interface. The company continued to have success through the second half of the 1980s, only to see it dissipate in the 1990s as the personal computer market shifted towards IBM PC compatible machines running MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows."

You can't successfully own code that you don't control.

I believe that the best outcome for both of you would be 20% of time set aside for refactoring and increasing test coverage. Sure you'd want more but features have to roll out too. Management may not realise that refactoring that much is necessary.

You may have to pad out estimates of new work, and say things like "in order to do that we'd have to understand the guts of the foo subsystem, and make sure that we don't break it while we change it, so we'll have to put tests around it while we change the code" while mentally adding a week's time refactoring and adding unit test coverage to foo to your estimate. Grease the moving parts - things that change once tend to change again, and you'll be happier the second time around.

If you can't even do that, ask them what they mean by "take ownership". Maybe they just want you to the go-to-guy for that particular monster. Say what would do if you really owned it. If you are completely overruled, you may have to be blunt and point out that this is not ownership in any non-bullshit sense.

If that fails, as the wise man said: if you can't change your company, change your company.

Could you sit down with one of his books and read it on an iPad or kindle?

It takes a lot more that just http. I'd need to know the URL schema if you're restful, or the method names if you're SOAPy. Then there's the format of the data (SOAP, JSON, XML ..) and the expected data fields in the data sent and received, etc.

It looks like Appleseed has at least being doing the "Release early, release often" thing, which is very important.

I really can't say that Diaspora has been doing that better. Or at all.

Then give me open protocols and endpoints so that I can write C# code to talk to it.

I think you lost the typical user at "whoever wants to download the source". Facebook users don't want to do that

Typical facebook users are not early adopters. None of these projects are even close to targeting typical facebook users yet.

All words are cool if you don't know what they mean. If the reader knows what it means but the writer doesn't, the effects are less predictable and desirable.

He mentioned in passing that writing a typical README requires just the right amount of planning upfront

"just the right amount of planning upfront" is exactly what Scrum should do. It's not full-circle at all, it's another approach to current good practices.

SCRUM ... all irrelevant unless the software we're building meets the needs of those that are using it.

That statement misses the entire point of Scrum. What are those short iterations for, if not to get feedback from those using the software? Why replan at the end of every sprint, if not to know how user needs have changed and been informed by the current software?

How is the readme so different from the sprint's user stories? Working from the desired end docs looks like another version of the currently fashionable "pull" methods. Not a bad one for a particular kind of project though.

Fusion works (in that it successfully fuses atoms) and has since the 1960s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

You don't get more energy out than you put in, but if your goal is to make helium, that's hardly the point - just about every other industrial process also consumes energy.

You're getting your midlife crisis in early. Damn over-achiever. http://twitter.com/#search?q=middleclassproblems

but if it has some level of transaction log trail (however asynchronous)

"All transactions are settled between the card and reader alone. Readers transmit the transactions to the back office in batches but there is no need for this to be done in real time." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oyster_card

People here are saying "I think/guess/assume that oyster cards work like... ". Without even checking with Wikipedia. I'd like to hear about the Oyster card system's strengths and weaknesses from someone who really knows the system.

topic is a dud link - it takes me to a login page.

I'm still not seeing "10 years late".

It is, but scratch the surface and you're in a world of macro syntax ugliness. Conventional programming languages are better than that. "NO code" yeah right. And that's not even the "hard stuff" that can't be done in excel.

Yep. The headline is absolutely no surprise considering how much development and promotion effort is going into Azure.

Making apps is programming - you can make it more accessible, but "programming" is still a good definition of the activity. Making programs with no programming knowledge sounds about as useful as driving forklift trucks with no forklift-truck-driving-knowledge.

There have been visual app generators before, for other platforms. None of them took the world by storm, and mostly were very limited and/or actually quite hard to learn - different from regular programming languages, but still with a learning curve. The devil's in the details, and a good programming language "makes easy things easy and hard things possible". App generators often succeed very well at the "makes easy things easy" part but fail at the "make hard things possible" bit.

the london-stock-exchange fiasco

Are you referring to this? http://blogs.computerworld.com/london_stock_exchange_to_aban...

Despite the ignorant and inflammatory commentary that I linked to, I doubt that Accenture's failure to write a system in C# raised much of a wave inside Microsoft. Accenture could have made the same mistakes in Java or in any other language.