UPDATE: Turns out that what I want to do, modeled after something used for RubyConf, can’t be done in stock Twitter. Seeing if I can persuade the Twitter people to work the same magic for me.Item: Richard P. Gabriel has this habit of making software people write or speak within artificial constraints.For writers’ workshops (book-length [...]

I’m doing something like performance testing as consultant now. First thing I say to my customer is this: I will not replicate real application usage! I will only emulate simultaneous clicking in a few places of your application: tiny functional coverage; incomplete environment and data; no emulation of unexpected events… It reminds me of a joke about physicists analyzing a spherical horse in a vacuum.

What's the difference between a pattern and a principle?



Well, some people can draw pretty much anything you put in front of them. They understand shape, and proportion, and perspective, and light and shade, and so on.

Some people know how to draw Marvin the Martian.

Due to recent turnover, my team has senior development leadership positions open. These are great opportunities for people who are committed to Agile development and Ruby on Rails. We are developing a new product line, mostly following XP, but also...

Bruce Daley posts on how most humans are biased to think they’re less error-prone than they are. As far as I know, that’s a claim solidly based in empirical research. (See also Bruce Schneier’s The Psychology of Security.) From this, he concludes:Given the nature of their work, software developers and software programmers suffer more from [...]