Wildfalcon

Thinking and developing in everything – by Laurie Young

Date archive for October, 2009

  • Getting better – in leaps

    29 October 09 • Comments

    The first million you ever make is the hardest – or so the saying goes.
    This is not only true, but its true at any scale. The first £100 you make, is the hardest. The first £1000 you make is the hardest. The first £10k you make is the hardest.
    This is because the hard thing is [...]

  • Is Rails Stagnating?

    27 October 09 • Comments

    The reason Rails is so amazing is the way it pushed the boundaries, and made everyone accept an order of magnitude improvement.
    On a business level, it made it an order of maginitude easier to create a websites. Companies that could not afford websites now can. Small teams that did not have the ability to build [...]

  • Crowd behaviour on a London Bus

    24 October 09 • Comments

    I just witnessed one of the most interesting events I have ever seen on a London Bus.
    This was a ride on a double decker bus on  a Saturday afternoon. On this particular trip there was a crowd of youths on the top deck, making a lot of noise as groups of teenagers typically do. A [...]

  • Guiding a Self Organising Team into Efficiency

    23 October 09 • Comments

    I just came back from ScrumGathering in Munich, and one of the hot topics was teams. How they are structured, and how to make them most efficient.
    Scrum states that teams should be self-organised, and this will allow them to form into the most efficient team possible given the set of people in them. But it [...]

  • Talking at Scrum Gathering

    23 October 09 • Comments

    Gwyn and I presented our Bamboo Toolbox at the Munich Scrum Gathering on Tuesday.
    The gathering was my first Scrum Gathering, and was one of the most enjoyable, friendly, and all round rewarding events I have been to.
    We had the presentation slot just after lunch on the second (of three) days, and just before the board [...]

  • What is big software anyway?

    15 October 09 • Comments

    This recent post by Ola argues that if you plan to write big software, you have already lost. He is talking about why we should not write projects with many many lines of code. To me, this is a bit of a truism. Is it not always the case that doing the same thing is [...]

  • Google Wave – First Impressions

    12 October 09 • Comments

    I’ve been REALLY looking forward to Google wave, and got my account last night. So far I have only had a few minutes to play, but enough to form an initial impression.
    It has a huge amount of potential, but there are one hell of a lot of rough edges to polish up first. I want [...]

  • Finally – Sequence Diagrams without the pain

    8 October 09 • Comments

    I love UML sequence diagrams! It’s a beautiful visual way of understanding how a series of method invocations work, what the interactions between them are, and generally a kick-ass tool for good understanding of whats going on.
    I have sequence diagrams! They are slow to draw, difficult to modify, and a big drag on a project [...]

  • Agile projects don’t *, They get smaller.

    7 October 09 • Comments

    Agile projects don’t run late
    Agile projects don’t run over budget
    Agile projects don’t have bugs
    Agile projects don’t deliver the wrong thing
    Agile projects don’t end up just not working
    Agile projects do get smaller.
    In most software projects there are many things can go wrong. Development taking too long, bugs, features that don’t quite fit the legal requirements. The [...]

  • Bamboo Toolbox

    6 October 09 • Comments

    Gwyn and I are going to be presenting at the upcoming Scrum Gathering presentation in Munich.
    We are presenting a tour de force of all the practical techniques we have developed over the last 18 months or so, while New Bamboo has been aggressively moving into a fully agile model. Lots of traditional scrum (and general [...]