PragDave

Quote o' the Week

This one has no definitive source, so it may well be totally inaccurate, but the concept is sound even if it was never said. :)

Francis Ford Coppola is reputed to have said that the difference between a good movie and a bad movie is getting everyone involved in making the same movie.

How could this apply to your current project?

Artima Interview - Tracer Bullets

The eighth installment of Bill Venners’ interview of Andy and me is now online. We’re talking about tracer bullets, prototypes, and iterations. The key to tracer bullets is the feedback they give: they let you know how well you’re aiming in a real-world environment. Short iterations and lots of feedback are the software development equivalent.

Lehrer's Elements

Fan’s of Tom Lehrer’s Elements song might enjoy Mike Stanfill’s Flash adaptation.

Development as Gardening?

In the seventh part of Bill Venner’s discussion with Andy and me, we’re talking about gardening as a metaphor for software development.

Thinking in terms of analogies is a useful way of extracting hidden meaning. Brian Marick and Ken Schwaber are co-hosting an interesting workshop at Alistair Cockburn’s Salt Lake Agile Development Conference. I particular like the first phrase in the description: The Analogy Fest is an attempt to manufacture serendipity .

Wiki/Blog Convergence (again)

The inexorable convergence of wikis and blogs continues, this time as the result of a request from a user (who happens to be a big-name author and all around nice fellow; let’s call him Joe). It started with a simple enough request. Joe wants to put his articles under RubLog, but also wants the capability of moving them around as he recategorizes his site (perhaps he had an article on TestFirst that was originally in the XP category, but then moved to a new category dedicated to testing).

Two things would go wrong if he moved the article. First, all the external references to the article would break: it used to be called XP/TestFirst.rdoc, and now it’s Testing/TestFirst.rdoc. Second, any WikiWord references to the article in the XP directory would break, as RubLog only looked for these in the same directory as the referring file.

So, between us, Joe and I cooked up something new. It comes in a number of parts.

• WikiWords are now potentially global. If RubLog finds a matching article in the same directory as the original, it uses that as the target. Otherwise it searches the whole blog.
• If multiple articles match, it generates a new kind of link that will display all of them. Saying that another way: a hyperlink in RubLog can now reference more that one target.
• That link also allows external reference to articles by name. For example, pragprog.com/pragdave/=MoreWikiBlog will find the article(s) called MoreWikiBlog whereever they occur in the site. This solves Joe’s migration problem. If he gives out these =xxx links, they’ll work even if the articles move.

And all this has an interesting side effect. Say Joe creates a table of contents file (call it Index.rdoc) in each of his article directories. Each of these separate files is free standing, and has links to the articles in that particular directory. To display this index, Joe could publish the URL

     joe.com/blog/Testing/Index.rdoc

However (and here’s the fun part), Joe could also publish the URL

     joe.com/blog/=Index

This would display all of the index files on his site on a single HTML page, giving the world a nice synopsis of all his articles.

I quite like this: too often we try to organize our world into artificial hierarchies. This kind of capability lets us cut across these; with this kind of blog you can now have temporal, hierarchial, and name-based views.

Code Generation

Jack Herrington just published a the transcript of an e-mail chat we had about code generation.