Wildfalcon

Thinking and developing in everything – by Laurie Young

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laurie

  • Software Craftsmanship

    Last night I went to a debate on Software Craftsmanship at SPA2010. The general consensus seemed to be that Software Craftsmanship is bad, but software craftsmanship is good. Notice the capital letters.
    I want to pick up a point Ade made. He said: “I don’t believe that good software comes from a process or an environment. [...]

  • Why is it so hard to learn?

    This is about learning, and learning is hard. Doesn’t matter if its learning  skill, a theory, or anything else what we can bundle into the category of learning
    I am learning to be  a latin dancer. I would love to get to the point where I am as good as these guys.
    Take posture for example. One of my [...]

  • Preparing and Rehearsing a Talk

    My colleague Gwyn and I have just returned from Krakow, Poland, where we gave our Sword of Integration talk. It was the best presentation we have given so far, both in terms of how well we feel we delivered it, and the feedback we got from the audience. So I wanted to share with you [...]

  • The Cult of Done

    I totally stole this from Bre Pettis, but it’s awesome so worth repeating
    The Cult of Done Manifesto

    There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
    Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get it done.
    There is no editing stage.
    Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you [...]

  • Practice daily tactical decision making

    You want to be successful
    I don’t know what you want to do with your day, week or life. However I am sure that whatever it is, you want to be successful at it. The best way to achieve this is not to obsess on strategy, but to practice making tactical decisions.
    Stategy and Tactics
    Most advice talks about [...]

  • Influencer Number

    Paul Erdos is famous in the world of mathematics. He spent his life travelling America, finding mathematicians to befriend and helping them with their work.
    In order to honour his contributions, the “Erdos Number” was created. Anyone who collaborated with Erdos on a paper has an Erdos Number of 1, any of their collaborators have an Erdos Number [...]

  • Chain of Fools

    What do you do when you have one person who is the repository of knowledge for a critical part of your project, infrastructure or similar.
    You need some way to address this situation, otherwise that poor person will go mad dealing with other peoples problems, never feel free to go on holiday, and if they get [...]

  • Getting better – in leaps

    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?

    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

    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 [...]