Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Vannevar Bush’s legendary essay from 1945, As We May Think: „Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and to coin one at random, „memex“ will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and…

„TMCore05 allows developers to take full advantage of the power of topic maps in their applications. The engine provides a robust store for multiple topic maps; an extensive API accessible via any language supported by the Microsoft CLR; and a high-level web services interface that allows both reading and updating of topic maps using SOAP-based…

Joey Hess – Keeping Your Life in Subversion: „I keep my life in a Subversion repository. For the past five years, I’ve checked every file I’ve created and worked on, every email I’ve sent or received, and every config file I’ve tweaked into revision control. Five years ago, when I started doing this using CVS,…

Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox on the Top-10 New Mistakes of Web Design is old (from 1999), but (sadly) still relevant – I’ve lost hope that sites like heise.de and golem.de will ever get this: „Opening up new browser windows is like a vacuum cleaner sales person who starts a visit by emptying an ash tray on…

Joel Spolsky’s Advice for Computer Science College Students: „When you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can’t do anything about that. The difference between a tolerable…

Giles Turnbull – Software stories: „I hope more developers will start telling the stories behind their apps; it’s interesting for anyone who uses the app, and can really help them understand little details.“

Joel Spolsky – Camels and Rubber Duckies „A lot of other good technologies have doomed themselves with high prices: Apple WebObjects was irrelevant as an application server because it started at $50,000. Who cared how good it was? Nobody ever used it! Anything made by Rational. The only way these products get into the hands…

While working on our new web application DC5, a total rewrite of its predecessor DC4, it occurred to me that you could say there’s five ways of looking at a web application, five interfaces that matter to its users. Getting any of these right, making it beautiful, is an art in itself. Getting all of…

Jon Udell’s Vancouver Python Workshop talk on The present and future value of Python: „The endgame here is a hybrid data engine with object, relational, and XML surfaces. Could you build such a thing in Python? I don’t see why not. If you can build a scalable high-performance object database like ZODB in Python, I’ll…

From 2002, J. Scott Johnson’s Software Engineering Practices for Large-Scale PHP Projects presentation (viewable with Internet Explorer only): „Aspects of Large Scale Projects: Version control Design notes Code reviews Knowledge capture Bug tracking Test plans Event Logging Throughout The Code Error Handling Throughout The Code Dynamic Error Alerting (to administrators) Redundancy 0 Data Loss Translation…