“Uncle bob completly misses the point by assuming that professionalism is about doing TDD”.

“Dynamic languages got popular for the wrong reasons

“people get religious about details that don’t matter, and very very few people are talking about the big picture”

“scrum is all about common sense, but common sense is really uncommon”

“teams are effective, and to be effective they have to be small. 3 is better than 5″

The less the median developer on a software project team is paid, the more the project will cost to complete.

Is that the solution to all the problems we are facing in the software industry ? Is a full week training going to change anything to the current situation ? The answer is clearly a big NO, but what I find extremely important with this new trend is that people are slowly realizing that if you want to develop software, you’d rather invest in your developers !

So long live to Scrum.org developer course, and let’s hope to see more initiatives like that!

1. Slashoid : Android news: stuff that matters
2. Phandroid: Android Phone Fans
3. Android Central : Android Central
4. MobileCrunch : Techcrunh’s mobile spin-off
5. mobile.slashdot.org : Slashdot’s mobile spin-off

Which ones do you often use ?

After a month of activity, things seem to go well. We average something like 60 unique visitors and about 150 page views per day. This is a good start, and will continue to rise as we get some visibility (From a SEO point of view, we are practically invisible). Any idea on how to improve this ?

In Scrum, there is no mechanism to show the bottlenecks of a process. You can only see that the realization of a task takes a long time or that the task is blocked. You have no idea why or where it is stuck unless you ask the team members. The burndown chart doesn’t help in that matter, when there is a bottleneck you can see some bumps on the graphs but the chart doesn’t capture any information on where is the delay is coming from. “

If you are using the dojo toolkit and are looking for a clean, customizable file uploader, that works pretty much the same way as gmail file attachment mechanism (demo here), then please check it out !

The most important features include :

• Cross-browser compliance: MFU has been successfully tested on IE6, IE7, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, and Opera. Moreover, it builds on top of dojo abstractions which provide a cross-browser compatiblity layer
• Ease of use: MFU either comes as an easy-to-use standalone, striped-down, optimized version, or as a module that can be plugged into any dojo-based application. MFU distribution comes bundled with a set of sample HTML/JavaScript templates as well as a sample PHP-based server-side implementation. See the Quickstart for more information.
• Customizable look: MFU takes advantage of dojo’s Template mechanism. As a matter of fact, the layout, links, and general appearance are completly configurable through an html template. This is particularly handy in situations where you need to customize MFU for your site’s look and feel.
• Internationalizable (i18n): All links and error messages take advantage of dojo’s internationalization support. You are more than welcome to fork the code on github to provide additional translations.
• Free Software: MFU is liberally dual-licensed under the New BSD license and the Academic Free License v2.1 (same license terms as dojo). Feel free to either contribute to or fork the source code on github

Please do not hesitate to drop me an email if you have trouble using MFU.

And of course, the project is hosted on github, so contributing is a breeze Just fork to provide additional code or translations, and we’ll be thrilled to include your enhancements in the next release.

BOZO Consulting

BOZO is a place with well-intentioned people who really want to please their clients. The only downside to BOZO is it doesn’t have the slightest clue about how to achieve that goal. BOZO says yes to everything: “Yes, of course we will cut the estimate.” “Yes, of course, we will lower our bill rate.” The idea is to get the deal at all costs. To summarize, BOZO has a sales-driven culture that lacks the ability to leverage any sort of delivery capability it accidentally hires (thought from Skorks: that would have to be one of the most buzzword driven sentences ever, how can we “leverage” that).

• Lessons learnt from Devver.net
• Startup lessons learnt from Warren Buffer
• My co-founder took my company and my girlfriend

There are many benefits to having a distributed team, but two stood out in our experience. First, we could hire top talent without having to worry about location (in fact, our flexibility regarding location was very attractive to most candidates we interviewed). Secondly, being in different locations allowed every team member to work with minimal distractions, which is invaluable when it comes to efficiently writing good code.

—-

We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly – or not at all – because of a stifling bureaucracy.

Warren Buffett excerpted in “Startup lessons learned from Warren Buffett” [thx Derick]

—-

And yes, a partnership is never really equal.  There has to be someone who is somewhat more equal than others. There is nothing more devastating than a partnership were all the members have exactly equal rights and votes. This just does not work. Human society and all monkeys always have a single individual at the top  and with all others, even though they are almost equal, being not quite equal.

• Too much clutter before being able to publish a scoop (tags, ..)
• Article publishing date/time does not work correctly
• Impossible to delete scoops

These issues are all related to Drigg/Drupal, but we will take a look at them whenever we get some time, to check wether things can be easily fixed.

So who in the hell should you hire? Hire the best. Hire people that can leave your startup at any minute if they wanted to because they’re so kick ass that they’re constantly getting contacted by interested parties. Then it becomes your job to ensure that you’re creating an environment that is equally as good as your people. Create a company that gives your people the most room for growth, creativity, a sense of ownership, and fun. And if you can’t hire the best then hire people with any level of experience (novice, intermediate, advanced) that have promise. Then help them become the best so that they can leave any time they want. Hint: they won’t. They’ll be loyal because you helped them become the best. Your goal should be to help every single employee get to the point where they’re the best in their field and are constantly getting job offers.

“He said it’s delayed as there are parties who are refusing to sign off JSRs they own and thus preventing the 1.7 release. It apparently has something to do with the cost of determining your Sun compliance.”

“The basis of the problem is the release process itself. The Java Community Process was meant to bring a more democratic process to JDK development, but it’s turned into an awful, bureaucratic mess, with too many people having too much of a say on what happens.”

So one of the worst downsides of CVS is _politics_. People, not
technology.
The upside of centralization is that a lot of things are easier. Easier to
think about, easier to get a stupid and straightforward idea working. 

But if you have hundreds of developers, and you have a dynamic trust
network (I trust some people, they trust others, and we all tend to trust
people more or less depending on what they work on), the CVS model is
absolutely HORRID. It just doesn't work.

The first visible part of our work is the launch of the Slashoid.org news website. The Launch of Slashoid post describes the intent of the website, and what we want this to be. Any kind of feedback and suggestions are more than welcome, and you can use our Slashoid Google Groups for this, for instance.

What is the next step ?

Well, we are a small team of motivated developers working from Montreal, and we would be thrilled to find partners in the area of mobile development. We can especially bring a lot of expertise in server-side application development, as well as in the agile stuff (tests, engineering practices, etc.), so we would love to collaborate on creating full-stack, mobile enabled applications. If you like the idea, do not hesitate to contact us to android@pyxis-tech.com

Well, it is now clear : google will open source the VP8 codec !

You can expect to hear a lot about that in the next few months.

• Google funds TheorARM open source project
• Youtube vs Ogg/Theora video quality comparison : Theora IS competitive (do not listen to the FUD)
• HTML5 video element codec debate explained
• Ogg codecs dropped from HTML5
• Google’s acquisition of On2 : what will they actually do with this ?

“The transition will work much better if several of your employees are already familiar with Git and can help you evangelize the idea and provide support to reticent users.”

“Looking back, it took me a while to warm up to Git (quite a while), but now that I’m here, I really enjoy using it.”

Additionally, the post includes really useful links to learn more about git.

Consistent hashing is a scheme that provides hash table functionality in a way that the addition or removal of one slot does not significantly change the mapping of keys to slots. In contrast, in most traditional hash tables, a change in the number of array slots causes nearly all keys to be remapped. By using consistent hashing, only K/n keys need to be remapped on average, where K is the number of keys, and n is the number of slots.

Add a few acronyms and formulas, and you have everything you need to kill a Buffalo.

The good news is that I came across this blog entry on consistent hashing that makes it really easy to understand what consistent hashing is used for, and how to implement it. It’s actually quite easy in the end

It would be nice if, when a cache machine was added, it took its fair share of objects from all the other cache machines. Equally, when a cache machine was removed, it would be nice if its objects were shared between the remaining machines. This is exactly what consistent hashing does - consistently maps objects to the same cache machine, as far as is possible, at least.

There are some decisions that are necessarily unpopular, but are important to prepare the future. Being unpopular does not necessarily means being bad, but it definitely means going against the opinion of some people, which is quite important if you want to get things done. No wonder that in just a few years, Ubuntu has gone from a _ZERO_ user base to being the most widely used Linux distribution. Compare it with Debian trends, which tries to satisfy everybody and use voting as its main decision tool.

But unlike politics who most often do not have the courage to make the tough calls, most of the successful Open Source projects leaders have the balls to enforce their vision, even if it means being heavily criticized. The reason is quite simple : what counts in the end is not the surrounding politics or perception of the community, but the actual effect of the decisions.  Open Source is a meritocratic environment where the good ideas win in the end.

“On that particular decision, we’ll have to let time tell. For the moment, the decision stands. I’m the first to admit fallibility but I also know that it would be impossible to get consensus around a change like that. If those tooltips are, on balance, really just clutter, then unless someone is willing to take a decision that will be unpopular, they will be clutter forever. And it’s easier for me to make a decision like that in Ubuntu than for virtually anybody else. I apologise in advance for the mistakes that I will certainly make, and which others on the design team may make too, but I think it’s important to defend our willingness to pare things back and let the core, essential goodness shine through.”

Of course, good leaders must also publicly admit when they’re wrong, and Linus Torvalds, another successful open source leader, has shown us his ability to admit it when he made the wrong calls.

“and sometimes make the wrong call, but if so, he’s proved willing to publicly admit his mistakes.”

And yes, the author is right about Math : it should be part of your tooling if you want to do something else than coding stupid web forms all day.

On a related note, I have been working with a team where most people in the team had Phds in various mathematics-related fields. I can tell you that learning how to correctly write tests was a joke for them ! They instantaneously understood :

• the value of testing
• where data-driven tests helps (@DataProvider)
• how unit-testing can complement integrated tests to avoid writing all combinations of integrated tests
• etc… (tons of other things that most teams take months – if not years – to understand)

The reason is quite simple  : people with a decent mathematical background exhibit abstraction skills and can perform abstract thinking and reasoning.

• Maximum numbers of developers on a project
• Surviving with many patches
• What Thoughtworkers think of git
• On real meritocracy
• Open Source is not a democracy

A few interesting quotes from the paper

“Regular 2-3 month releases deliver stable updates to Linux users, each with significant new features, added device support, and improved performance.”

“The rate of change in the kernel is high and increasing, with over 10,000 patches going into each recent kernel release. These releases each contain the work of over 1000 developers representingaround 200 corporations.”

“Since 2005, over 5000 individual developers from nearly 500 different companies have contributed to the kernel”

“We have seen a roughly 10% increase in the number of developers contributing to each kernel release cycle.”

“The kernel code base has grown by over 2.7 million lines”

“Patches do not normally pass directly into the mainline kernel; instead, they pass through one ofone-hundred or so subsystem trees. Each subsystem tree is dedicated to a specific part of the kernel (examples might be SCSI drivers, x86 architecture code, or networking) and is under the control of a specific maintainer.”

Once again, there might be a few things we can learn from Open Source.

Second, here are a set of OSGI-enterprise implementations :

• Apache Aries : sponsored by IBM and SAP
• Eclipse gemini : sponsored by Oracle and SpringSource
• Eclipse virgo : donated by SpringSource (formerly known as spring-DM) – reference implementation of OSGI enterprise)

On a totally unrelated note, please take a look at the “Relationship to existing projects” on Eclipse virgo’s page. This will give you an idea of how decoupled the Open Source world is : each project has its own Project Leader, its commiters, contributors, and even though the projects depend on each other, there is only limited communication between them. Each project can be developed according to its own schedule, and this is the way open source can scale. The limit is the sky !

Once again, there are maybe some things we can learn from Open Source.

Marc-Andre Thibodeau and Vincent Tence have set-up a sample Petstore project on github that shows how to take advantage of this new release of Hibernate Validator.   Feel free to take a look !

Nice brain gymnastics, and it is definitely worth checking out if you want to add a few tricks to your power-user recipes

“No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback, good data, are welcome. But
we are not voting on design decisions.”

“Shuttleworth is in the right here. Ubuntu and a vast majority of free and open source software projects, including the Linux kernel, have never been democracies. They are meritocracies, and any member of a community that thinks otherwise is kidding themselves.”

“too many hands on a project with no consensus of direction leads to a pretty crappy project“

“It’s critical to recognize that open source does not bring complete democracy to software development. It never did, and it never should. Ultimately, someone in the developer chain will have to make the tough calls.”

So, if you run your software development project as a Democracy, there might be some things you can learn from Open Source.