http://compoundthinking.com/blog New Perspectives on Information Technology Fri, 16 May 2008 03:23:12 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Prolonged adolecence is not a new problem, it's just new to the masses: Children of kings and great magnates were the first to grow up out of touch with the world. Suburbia means half the population can live like kings.... Paul Graham You can't shelter people from everything bad or scary, and ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/14/suburbia/ Ocean asks on his blog is data an asset? Data is certainly not like many other assets, it doesn't depreciate, you can copy it endlessly, and it's next to impossible to imagine a commodities market for data. Heck copying the data can either increase it's value (think "The ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/14/what-is-data/ Threads may not be be best way, or the only way, to scale out your code. Multi-process solutions seem more and more attractive to me. Unfortunately multi-process and the JVM are currently two tastes that don't taste great together. You can do it, but it's not the ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/14/threads-processes-rails-trubogears-and-scalability/ Last week, I ranted a little bit about motivational meetings. Today I'll make the opposite case. Why have motivational meetings? The right way to use motivational meetings is to reaffirm the purposes of the group, and help people to connect the dots between their individual efforts and the collective ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/12/the-motivational-meeting/ It think the very idea that motivation can be "imparted" in a morning meeting, or a half day seminar is kind of demeaning. Motivation is a complex network of hopes, dreams, fears, needs, frustrations, incentives, and personal morality. Motivating people is as much about connecting their individual aspirations to ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/05/motivate-me-when-im-dead/ What does done mean? Somebody was telling me that Ruby 1.9 was "pretty much done" last night. What is Ruby 1.9? Do we have a spec? A test suite? Anything? If the answer is no, it's not ready. --Charels Nutter (in a comment here) Partly that's because Charels ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/05/for-some-very-small-values-of-done/ Paying people too well can lead to all kinds of social and motivational problems. Of course, you can also run out of money, but I'm not going to talk about that problem. I'm talking about salaries that are maintainable but significantly above the market norm. Clark Ching ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/30/the-dangers-of-paying-too-well/ Tim Bray is blogging about "inflection points" in the uptake of various technologies. Python get's a very positive review: Today you’d be nuts not to look seriously at PHP, Python, and Ruby. So, the rise of the so-called scripting languages is one of the inflection points, but it's not the only ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/30/so-many-revolutions-so-little-time/ Chris McDonough just posted a pretty extensive writeup of something he and Florent hacked up recently. Basically he helped us to put together some helpers that turn the repoze.who project into very similar authentication/authorization system to what we had in Turbogears 1.0. The cool thing ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/30/authentication-in-tg2/ If stress is a weed, urgency is the seed. --Jason Fried Just the other day a project manager I know asked me how she can "instill a sense of urgency" in her team. She wants to get more done, and get it done faster. Increasing developer productivity is ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/30/urgency-vs-motivation/ I don’t think it’s possible to over emphasize the importance of developing teams in software companies. Software production is a group activity, and Brooks, Lister, Demarco and Weinberg all announced this same thing in various ways. And they have been saying it for a long time. The ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/24/on-layoffs-jelled-teams-and-my-new-job-status/ The TurboGears community is proud to welcome the participation of six Google Summer of Code participants. These students have proposed very interesting projects, done a lot of research, and promise to make TurboGears and related projects better. The goal of the Google Summer of Code project is to get ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/22/google-summer-of-code-meets-turbogears/ I thought the top 10 command line meme was interesting, and it seems to be going around. For me nosetests seems to be by far the most run command on my system -- I guess that means I've been infected the testing meme as well. ramoth:mramm markramm$ history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/04/11/command-line-meme/ Zed Shaw and I spent quite a bit of time talking about Documentation tools, since we are both working on books for Prentice Hall and we both want to have an open-source, reusable tool-chain that helps us get tested code into our documentation easily and effectively. Zed did a bunch ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/21/documentation-tools/ First I want to congratulate Chris Arent and Chris Perkens who put a lot of work into the Google Summer of Code application for TurboGears. The GSoC has been very good for python, and good for TurboGears in the past, and it's really nice to take this to ... http://compoundthinking.com/blog/index.php/2008/03/21/google-summer-of-code/