This is just an administrative announcement: I have moved exubero.com to be hosted by wordpress.com. It was previously hosted on a EC2 server and database. At the time I moved exubero.com to AWS, I felt it was an interesting project to learn the AWS tools and infrastructure. In that sense, it was a good way to … Continue reading The Hosting of exubero.com has Changed
Software Development is an Engineering Discipline
There is a view that software development is a craft; that "Software Craftsmanship" is a better metaphor for software development than is engineering or science. I'm going to argue against this view: software development is an engineering discipline, and relies strongly on scientific principles. Firstly, what is an engineering? Here's one definition of the engineering method: … Continue reading Software Development is an Engineering Discipline
Elephant Carpaccio
I co-facilitated Alistair Cockburn's elephant carpaccio exercise yesterday. This is an exercise to teach developers and business analysts: How to slice large applications into 1-day to 1-week requests, from the business perspective How to slice application requests into 15-30 minute work slices, from both the business and programming perspective Previously, there had been some discussion at work … Continue reading Elephant Carpaccio
Develop a Team Vision
This post describes the first day of my Bringing Distributed Teams Together series (read that first to see the larger context of this post). TL;DR Using combinations of clean language, active listening, conflict resolution models, and directed questions from the facilitators, all the team members were able to gain empathy and understanding for each other … Continue reading Develop a Team Vision
Bringing Distributed Teams Together
It was a very busy week for me - representatives from all the teams that I work with were in London for three days of group workshops. I was running around trying to make sure everything happened when it should, which was quite exhausting. In the end, pretty much all the participants gave a big thumbs up to the … Continue reading Bringing Distributed Teams Together
Agile Applications with Java
I've been re-reading a couple of resources on modern application design: The Twelve-Factor App Java Doesn't Suck – You’re Just Using it Wrong Those links contain a huge amount of distilled knowledge and advice on how we should build applications today. If you're working on applications that don't follow the advice in those articles, take … Continue reading Agile Applications with Java
Devops 101
I recently saw a reference to Devops 101 on Twitter. It looked interesting, so I bookmarked it, and forgot about it for a few weeks. Last night I finally got around to trying the exercises - it was a bit of an eye-opener. There's a huge amount of functionality on AWS that I'm not really … Continue reading Devops 101
Keybase
Well, I finally received an invitation to join keybase.io. My Keybase profile is: https://keybase.io/tumbarumba. I first heard about Keybase from a post by Tim Bray in March. I've been quite interested in crypto stuff since forever, but I've never been able to use it consistently in all my communications. Given the increasing surveillance issues on-line, it seems prudent … Continue reading Keybase
Management Training for the Twentieth Century
So, I recently took management training course. There was some useful stuff taught in the course (such as delegation, coaching, and performance management, among other things). I learnt a lot, most of it useful. I'm not here to talk about that, though. I'm here to rant... First problem: the feedback method they were teaching was the "shit … Continue reading Management Training for the Twentieth Century
It’s the People, Stupid!
I'm a career technologist. Building software systems that people find useful (as possibly love) gives me a great thrill. I've spent more than 25 years learning many arcane bits of knowledge that makes it possible for me to contribute to the construction and maintenance of these software constructs. Historically, I have mainly focused on technical skills and … Continue reading It’s the People, Stupid!
Renaissance Developer 