http://www.programmersparadox.com Is anything I write real? Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:02:56 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I was reading Bill de hOra the other day, and he mentions Tesler's Law. I'd never heard of Tesler or his law, so I followed the link. Turns out Larry Tesler is a pretty big name in the user interface field, as far as I can gather, although ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/08/17/teslers-law/ Can the amount of Nerf wars that occur in an office be an indication of the health of a company (or at least of employee moral)? The more Nerf wars that employees have is an indication they are happier. Why? It is a sign that people are being outgoing ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/08/12/nerf-war-indicator/ This is just a reminder that you should write failing unit tests first, so that when you forget if __name__ == '__main__' unittest.main() in your test file, like I did, you don't think everything is working because none of the tests fail. http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/08/07/write-failing-unit-tests-first/ Agile processes have become the darling of the industry, and certainly there is good reason for this.  They do tend to facilitate communication and development practices that lead to better software.  However, paralleling the transition to agile is a more insidious transition: a push towards open office spaces. The argument goes ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/08/04/why-programmers-need-privacy/ Being agile does not mean rigidly adhering to a system called Agile.  Being agile means adapting to the situation at hand, no matter how you choose to adapt. That's my take from Steve McConnell's latest post and I completely agree with him. http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/07/29/being-agile/ Designing for the Social Web is a recently published book written by Joshua Porter, the man behind the the design blog and website Bokardo.  I’ve been reading Bokardo for a while now, and so when Designing for the Social Web became available, I picked up a copy for myself. The book ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/07/27/designing-for-the-social-web/ I'm currently using Thrift at work.  It's a convenient way to shuttle data across different services and to invoke remote procedure calls.  I like it because of how lightweight it is, so I don't have to wrestle with code for a kitchen when all I need is a faucet. The one ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/07/22/thrift/ The man I consider the best technical blogger on the Internet laid down his pen today, giving up blogging.  Raganwald said goodbye. I wish him all the best.  Now comes the hard part: finding other bloggers to replace him in my RSS reader.  I glanced through my reader today and realized ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/07/22/farwell-to-the-best/ If you're reading this post, I'd like to thank you for sticking around.  I've been gone from this blog for much longer than I anticipated and I semi-apologize for that.  While I didn't intend to abandon writing, other events in my life were more important and as a result this ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/07/22/housecleaning/ I just spent this past weekend at the No Fluff Just Stuff conference, the Raleigh edition.  It was a very enlightening experience.  While it is a Java focused conference, it is still a great event to learn a lot, even if you aren't a Java heavy developer, like myself.  I ... http://www.programmersparadox.com/2008/06/22/no-fluff-just-stuff/