blog.frantically.org

This week has been a strange week. Mostly, it seems, prescribed by Conway’s law:
Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

I got quite excited when Paywave was launched in the UK and got a combined Oyster card with credit card and PayWave from Barclaycard. You can spend upto £10 by waving your card against a small reader in a shop without a PIN. It’s designed to be a cash replacement with a low per transaction […]

According to Barry Schwartz on Ted Talks, we’re happier when we have less choice. If we go to a store and they only have three pairs of jeans you can choose from, you buy the best fitting and leave the store knowing you did the best you could. When they have twenty pairs to choose […]

I suppose unsurprisingly, I’ve had a few jibes that go roughly like this recently:
No posts since November, not exactly frantic!
A fair point. However, to put the record straight, frantically.org was selected to represent my state of mind when madly typing away at a keyboard, rather than a statement of regular posting. When I do get […]

Anyone in either a position of responsibility or the face of the customer often has to defend policies that they may not agree with. I felt I had to share this one because of it’s great lack of ownership or ability to question the insane.

Helpdesk
Hi, my name is D[hiss,crunch], how can I help?

Tim
Hi, I currently […]

From a variety of sources, this blog on the 5 Principals for Programming came my way. Two bits really grabbed me:
We know that c/java/lisp/haskell have not one bit of power that isn’t in simple assembly langauge–they only allow us to express the ideas more clearly and prevent certain kinds of stupid mistakes. There is no […]

It happens to most applications. Eventually, the time required to implement new functionality becomes so long that it can’t be justified in terms of cost. This leaves the customer with two options:

Put the application into RTB (Run The Bank) mode. i.e. keep the existing functionality but don’t add any more. “The new things I wanted […]

Recently we’ve seen a load of anti-agile commentary. For example:
Good vs Bad Agile
Obie’s Comments on Pairing (via Tom)
The Death of Agile
To add my tuppence:
Software development exists to service the needs of a customer. Being religious about agile does not aid the customers requirements, neither does ignoring it. Know why you are doing what you […]

For the last few years I’ve worked for an investment bank that has prided itself in it’s attitude towards technology. In hard times, we created a environment that introduced many new collaborative tools. This in turn led to many people hosting internal and external blogs.
… and here we are after a few years of reading […]