Posted by Kris Geusebroek at around evening time: January 23rd, 2012
While we were building a little server to enable auditlogging on our hadoop cluster (more on that in a future blogpost) we needed a way to distribute our application.
This blog is about the packaging of this application. The application is build with nodejs and packaging and dependency management is mostly done with npm (the node package manager).
Of course installing this application in the production environment should have been as easy as the setup on our own laptop’s right? Wrong! On our laptops it was a easy git clone followed by a npm install and voila we have a running application. So how hard could it be to do this on a server at the client. Let me tell you….
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Posted by Maarten Kennis terribly early in the morning: January 15th, 2012
The country of Samoa has decided to skip a day, the 30th of december 2011 doesn’t exist on Samoa. This decision was driven by economical reasons. I wonder, what potential problems we can run into regarding software development for our IT systems depending on timezone information?
To skip a day, it all sounds so easy. First of all i was curious to know if similar situations have occured in the past and what the software development pitfalls could be. A small investigation showed me that you need to be careful with assumptions regarding regional timezone issues. Let’s have look at how a programming language like JAVA handles these kinds of situations.
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Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: January 13th, 2012
Scaling the productowner (PO) role is tricky business. When you scale up too much within the same context, things become cumbersome. We don’t want to bring back the same centralized fear ridden ineffective decision making climate, we tried to kill off in the first place. When people spend so much time and effort to bring back entrepreneurship, they don’t want to create layer over layer of hierarchical PO/CPO relationships.
So if there is this perceived risk of fallback involved, why do we actually want to scale the PO role at all?
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Posted by Urs Peter in the early evening: December 5th, 2011
Being relatively new to html5 and mobile development I spotted an excellent opportunity to catch up with the latest trends during the QCon conference in San Fransisco where they offered a wide variety of html5 and mobile tracks.
In this blog I’ll share the insights I gained during the conference. After reading it you should have an overview of the following:
- where html5 is right now and where it is heading to with regard to mobile development
- the benefits and drawbacks of html5 for web-apps compared to native apps
- how to bridge some of the shortcomings of html5 with regard to native apps
- valuable pointers to resources helping you to get started with html5 mobile development
Posted by Friso van Vollenhoven mid-afternoon: November 29th, 2011
I made a map of my followers on Twitter. This is not entirely straight forward, as most Twitter users don’t attach geo coordinates to their tweets or profiles. Luckily, many people leave something sensible in the location field of their profile (e.g. ‘Amsterdam’ or ‘London, UK’). You can match this field against a Lucene index of all the cities in the world, which I happen to have. I was able to place 15 out of my grand total of 19 followers on the map.
Followers of @fzk:
Why is this important? Read on! Also, somewhere down the line I will explain how to make such a map for your own account.
Note: this is a cross post. You can see the original here: http://waredingen.nl/twitter-data-fun.
Posted by Kristian Spek mid-afternoon: November 26th, 2011
When I start a new consulting job at an organization, I like to ask people how their organization became the organization it is today. Most of the time, people start telling me about the history of their organization or the values and goals they have. People sometimes start telling me about the people who work in the organization. But I have never got an answer that fullfilled my question completely. What made organizations what they are right now? After reading ‘Die Frage nach der Technik’ written by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), I got an answer that could help me structure all the answers people gave to me. (more…)
Posted by Urs Peter in the wee hours: November 26th, 2011
For testing a restful service API I was looking for a lean library, which would allow me to test CRUD operations of rest services with as little code as possible.
My search led me to Dispatch, which is a highly compact Scala DSL wrapper around Apache’s reliable HttpClient. This DSL, however, is not very well documented and rather hard to decipher due to it’s heavy usage of symbolic method names but nevertheless highly appealing when understood.
In this blog I’ll decipher it for you and show how easy it is to test restful services with mere oneliners.
Posted by Daniel Burm around lunchtime: November 25th, 2011
I am convinced that the next blue ocean of agile minds can be found in the creation of sharing ecosystems that are built on shared purpose, trust, intuition and a facilitation of the deeply wired human urge to cooperate as a collective. Understanding that modern day individualism is smothering our effectiveness is a catalyst for our drive to start working together and forming the effectiveness of these systems.
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Posted by Jarl Meijer in the early evening: November 24th, 2011
Imagine you are playing a game of rugby against some blacksuited guys who are doing some odd dancing and screaming exercise before you finally get to start playing. You win the game 27 – 3. You can imagine it wasn’t just one beer at the big party after the match and you did not see home before early morning. A year later your team finds itself in the same stadium against the same guys, doing the same little piece of folk dancing, just a little louder than last year. This time you win 27 – 6, only. The coach and the crowd are going mad: your team lost half of its performance in just a year time! You take a shower, no beers, go home and go to bed early. Measuring the improvement in performance is easy! How about Scrum teams? ….
Posted by Iwein Fuld just before lunchtime: November 2nd, 2011
In the past years there has been much ado about the quality of software. Programmers have emancipated and evolved into software craftsmen. Metrics have been defined and honed to measure the quality of code and deliverable artifacts. More and more of our clients are asking for guidance in achieving higher and higher quality goals.
The discussion about software craftsmanship hasn’t been all positive. Many developers that I’ve worked with express the feeling that certain levels of quality are only driven by the personal gratification of craftsmen and not in line with the economic realities of our trade. In this article I strive to establish guidelines in the compromise between quality and speed. I feel it is warranted to be more nuanced than the simplistic statement: “Going fast by going well”. This is because “going well” can mean different things in different contexts.
I look for a line in the sand between improving quality to improve procreation and improving quality for mere self indulgent practice.
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