Some posts I liked to read this week
A Microcosm of Agile Design Jeremy Miller goes to describe how design gets done in an Agile project. He specifically uses a real example of a project which he participated in. The architect decided to have all business logic implemented as web services and have the UI as mere client of this layer. He argues that does is unnecessary and goes against the agile way. Although I don't agree with all his arguments, this post brings back some memories. Years ago I've been responsible of a project that was designed just this way by the company "global" architect, I was overrided in the design by him (after all he was the client and the client does gets way with his way). His arguments were very similar. The interface was just another of the logic and all types of applications could be clients of the application (later when they could decide to separate the logical layers in physical layers). It was a pain to develop and wasn't exactly fast. :-) After all these years the application still had no other clients and the UI and the business logic still runned in the same machine. He got away with what he wanted and i got way with the added delays that his approach brought to the project.
Programming is Hard, Let's Go Scripting... Larry Wall as always write a very entertaining (of the yearly) Perl's State of the Onion. He does this exposing some of the history of languages, language anatomies and design. Describes the big scripting languages, the future of scripting and Perl. It's not only very informative, but brings me back some memories. After all my roots have always been on Unix and still haven't forgot the power of scripting.
The Programmer Dress Code - Having a hard time classifying this. A strange post, but it talks about some legends in our field. Can't really explain why I've liked it. But it is always good to remember some of the people who influenced our field so much.
Do you really know where that code has been? Jeremy Miller argues against code that is deployed from builds manually done on a developers workstation instead of a an automated build server.
Another paging approach Ayende Rahien of rhino mocks brings us a very neat pagination technique that he learned from Dynamics CRM.
The Missing Curriculum for Programmers and High Tech Workers - Things the author has learned after college that should have been taught in college. Entertaining and most of the items of the list are on the mark. To this list I would basic economic principles.Some of David Ricardo theories like the principle of comparative advantage , the basic opportunity cost concept and what the heck Adam Smith wouldn't hurt either.