Some posts I liked to read this week
Michael Kölling of BlueJ fame wrote a post entitled Every Open System develops towards the unusable which he discusses of open source software tends to get bloated and why it happens. I don't disagree with him, but i'm sure this doesn't just plague open source software but it is something that can be generalized to almost any software. The problem is that while developing software we tend to confuse features with needs.
Best Reuters photos of the year not sure who classified them as best of the year. But interesting nonetheless. In a similar note the most emailed photos (acording to yahoo that is).
African Fractals Ron Englash's Ted Talk about the fractal architecturing that he researched all through Africa. His findings are not just amazing. They are humbling, how much wisdom knowledge has been accumulated and designed through the centuries by popular wisdom. Not scholars who are stuck on his college offices studying formulas and formalizing things have been discovered by much simpler methods. :-)
Two Stories of Simplicity I'm sure there is some learning and morals to be learned on this story. I'm not sure exactly what, but i liked them. :-)
Time for Luddite & Wanton Label Chiefs to go The title is a little misleading, and i wouldn't read if i just saw the title. However is a nice recap of the current state of the music industry and why it is on a path doomed for failure. An industry that refuses to face the facts and hasn't understood the world has changed. An industry that stopped adding a value to what it does, treats it's customers as criminals, doesn't gives them what they want.
Twentysomething: Why I regret getting straight A’s in college Jon Morrow laments the fact that he just worked too damn hard in college to earn straight A's when he should have focused more on other things. I guess it's a common misconception about college. Are you there to have an education or are you there to have a degree? I don't know what it happens on other countries. But in here, people tend to think of college (actually the diploma or a title) as the end of the journey, when it is exactly the opposite it just the start of the way to get an education.
Infrastructure: Don’t Study It, Build It (Agile Style) While (some) people in Software Engineering are craving for more formalization and wishing software engineering was more science like and more predictable as civil engineering this guy (who works in civil engineering) is wishing civil engineering was more like agile software development. I've found this post to be highly ironic.
I've been always fond of Ward Cunningham Technical Debt term. On the Technical Debt Decision Making post Steve McConnell gives you a way to roughly estimate the cost of a technical debt to help you in the process of decision making (to technical debt or not technical debt that is the question)