Brugge Blog

A blog post by Dan North has some great bits on agile software processes, using the analogy of evolution.
the various flavours of agile development, such as XP, Crystal, Scrum, Lean and DSDM, are all trying to solve the same problem, … they are trying to make software delivery evolvable. This ensures that delivery isn’t wrong-footed […]

There seems to be some small groundswell of attention to Dependency Management lately, although it may always be something of a fringe topic. In particular, I’m talking about it’s meaning as in “making decisions about the structure of your system so that it has the kinds of dependencies between pieces that you want.” It’s important, […]

Back at one of the No Fluff Just Stuff Java symposiums in 2003, Dave Thomas had an introductory talk on Ruby that he advertised as being worth it just for the fact that learning some Ruby would change the way you approach Java. I haven’t played with Ruby much yet, but when I asked Dave […]

Ned Batchelder brought up an interesting piece on “old bugs” that bug Joshua Bloch recently found in, of all things, the classic binary sort algorithm. The standard algorithm that everyone has been using for some fifty years has apparently had a bug waiting to happen. It’s dealing with an edge condition, but that’s where […]

I hadn’t noticed until I was done that my time reading Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet had all been when I was staying up later than I probably should. Not that that’s an unusual reading pattern for me, but I hadn’t noticed the geeky symmetry while I was in it.
I […]

Can you get an elephant to dance? Large software teams usually have so much friction with them, thanks to all of the communication channels (or lack thereof) and internal integration to manage that it’s been a good dodge for managers or organizations who don’t want to think about agile processes. “That stuff has only been […]

I’m going to guess that about 99% of links to books that I come across are links to their page on Amazon.com. There is certainly a wealth of information about the book there, but Amazon’s not trying to educate me about it, they’re trying to sell it to me.
A couple of years ago I came […]

Ned Batchelder has a link to a story on a tour of Pixar. As he says, it’s quite amazing. These are not your father’s (or your) cubicles. I get the sense that the people who work there would love what they do no matter where they had to work, but that having surroundings like that […]

In a fascinating paper, “Googlearchy: How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web”, the authors put forth their research findings that web sites of political groups seem to have the same type of visibility characteristics as other categories of web sites - that is, that a few big, well-known sites are visited and […]

The name draws you in, then the concept hooks you: a dynamic language modeled on concepts from Python and Ruby but with its roots (and branches) in Java. Groovy just sounds very fun, to the ear and to the Java-edged mind. With languages like these graduating from “scripting languages” or “little languages” to the more […]