Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Sam Ruby points to IBM’s confession (and recommends PHP and other technologies): „Application development using IBM programming models and tools is untenably complex. The Research Division’s new Services and Software strategy includes a strong focus on radical simplification. […] Over 70 people in IBM worldwide are currently participating in an effort to define the problem,…

Tim Bray – Still Needs Measuring: „Except for, during the night, the guys from Microsoft went around, erased Netscape from all the computers, and installed Internet Explorer. I have some perspective now, but at the time I literally had to go outside the conference and sit down away from everybody, because I was afraid I’d…

Jon Udell at InfoWorld – Styles of Web application intermediation: „Consider a purchase order represented as an XML document and governed by a policy that requires schema validity. We can enforce that policy either on the wire or on the desktop. One way buys you application-independent consistency. The other way lets you tailor your users‘…

Jon Udell – Sufficiently simple technology: „When I ran into trouble with Rubric, and couldn’t find the SQL INSERT INTO statement anywhere in the code, I knew I’d have to learn about Class::DBI in order to proceed. Result: I punted. Scuttle is written in PHP, and doesn’t use any such abstraction layer. When I ran…

John Lim – PHP’s lucky number 4: „Last week, I downloaded PHP 5.0.4. I’ve not been sufficiently impressed with previous versions of PHP5 to actually recommend its use. PHP 5.0.4 is the first version of PHP 5 that I would consider sufficiently stable for production use; PHP 5.0.4 finally passes most of the same Q&A…

Paul Graham – Copper and Tin: „The hard part about figuring out what customers want is figuring out that you need to figure it out. But that’s something you can learn quickly. […] And compared to the sort of problems hackers are used to solving, giving customers what they want is easy. Anyone who can…

Joel Spolsky – The Road to FogBugz 4.0: Part IV: „Before we could launch FogBugz, even after the final shipping bits were perfect and ready to go, we had a list of things we wanted to have ready to make the product experience complete. For FogBugz 4.0 the big things were: 1. Professional-quality graphic design…

Andrew Cowie at ONLamp.com – Extreme System Administration: „Write user stories. Jot down, in just a few sentences, what the user experience will be for interacting with your group, your systems, or some process interface you are creating. Share this with people–your team, your boss, and above all the people who will use it. […]…

Julio M. Merino Vidal at ONLamp.com – Making Packager-Friendly Software: „A package maintainer, or packager, is a person who creates packages for software projects. He eventually finds common problems in these projects, resulting in a complex packaging process and a final package that is a nightmare to maintain. These little flaws exist because in most…