Developing Upwards

Youtube, what the hell is up with your upload APIs? Here we are, hacking along and being all "Hey, we got accounts syncing and thumbnails popping up and videos getting attached to blog posts and its nifty-pie, oh yeah." when we make the move to be even more web 2.0y and add full authentication with youtube accounts and integrate the full upload cycle into the media selection. We take some little video upload tests and we're happy about that. Oh, that was a nice milestone to hit in FogBugz , I tell you what. The week passes and suddenly I'm asked why all the video uploads keep failing. All the usual things are checked, but the upload tokens validate and the headers are correct. All our tests are within the upload limits, too. These aren't friendly "Hey, I really hate to tell you this, but the video you just uploaded didn't go so well. Can you try it again in a bit? Thanks"-errors, either. These are "Fuck off. I just reset your HTTP connection, bi...

While ignoring completely that I was promised access to the FogBugz OnDeman 7.0 Beta program and just forgotten somehow, I'm going to come say that one day with the official release and I'm more excited than ever to be a FogCreek customer. Yes, I am still a card carrying free software nut-bag . I'm absolutely sure certain individuals will get grated at me, again, for not using Trac like a good geek. Call me a fanboy, but boy-oh-boy is this a sweet release. It is a shining example of knocking a release out of the park and impressing everyone (who could be impressed at all, and thus disregarding those who will never be impressed by a commercial, for-profit bug tracker, ever, no matter what, not in a million years). The experience is absolutely slick. Faster, brighter, shinier. Packing new features, improved features, and bug fixing in a new package is a great way to make the functional improvements stand out. Even if we have a good design, any product should take a note fro...

Or, the working title: How To Look Down At The Tower of Turtles We're a recursive bunch. We're more repetitive than . There is no shortage of writing that its caches all the way down or that we're repeating the mainframe/dumb terminal era. I have an argument that our entire profession is hinged on repeating ourselves. Repetition is in the DNA of what we do. Software is the ultimate commodity, approaching zero-cost production. Solve one problem and the solution is applied to a thousand problems. Generalize and solve a million. Everything we do is repeated and is about repeating things. At the core, we're just moving little bits around and we repeat that action over and over, with very slight alterations. We abstract the repetition, and then we repeat the abstraction so much we need to abstract that. We could continue to make individual observations, like the mammoth stack of caches every bit goes through or the abstractions we build up over and over on top of our languag...

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools What's the Point? Some opinions, while held, are held softly. I believe the understanding is the opinion changes nothing and you aren't doing anything about it, so giving a damn is pointless. You may call it apathy, but I call it misunderstanding the nature of information. Information spreads from those who have it to those who do not and those in agreement grease the wheels of that distribution. Of course, there are good developers who don't care if there are bad developers. I'm not convinced they're still reading, at this point. If they are, then the reasons we can make a difference should help convince you to care about that difference in the first place. The more widely held the beliefs that we can and should do something to improve the quality of this industry, the more likely anything will happen. You might not be lecturing in the class...

How To Teach Software Development Introduction Developers Quality Control Motivation Execution Businesses Students Schools Doctors and lawyers in the United States have the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association, respectively, and surely have analog organizations in other countries. As representatives of their professions, they work collectively with their colleagues at a reasonable and useful goal: quality control. It is in the interest of doctors that their med students are not idiots. It is in the interest of lawyers that their opponents are not (more) unethical. There are other, perhaps less admirable uses of these controls (too many doctors would lower all their salaries). There is no such quality control in our industry. We have individuals at the lowest end of the ability spectrum and at the highest peaks of skill, and, we have the teaches of many years of expensive higher educations on some of our shoulders and only the passion of self-teaching for oth...

Yes, this is a screenshot of a screenshot. Stick with me, but I really do has a point to this! I have to admit, publicly, that I clicked the button. The one in the screenshot. The one that isn't a button, just a PNG image. I should be glad it wasn't a pop-up! I realized my mistake at the moment I was clicking on it, but it happened to fast to stop. I had to sit and think for a moment. Why did I do that? It drove me to write this pretty immediately and do a couple mock ups for solutions. I never want to let my users loose information or control over it. That is, we don't want them to OK a message away and neglect to actually read it and we don't want them to click "send" before they're really, really ready to confess their never ending love to Glenn Beck. Those are two distinct safety nets. Information the user missing for being click-happy and actual actions within the application they might have wanted to avoid. Any reversible actions, like closing a dial...

The two recent posts about some individuals' choice of GPL versus others' preference for BSD and MIT style licensing has caused a lot of debate and response . I've seen everything as an interesting combination of very important topics being taken far too seriously and far too personally. All involved need to take a few steps back. For the uninitiated and as a clarifier for the initiated, we're dealing with (basically) three categories of licensing when someone releases software (and/or its code): Closed Source. Easiest to explain, because you just get nothing. GPL. If you get the software, you get the source code, you get to change it, and anything you combine it with must be under the same terms. MIT and BSD. If you get the software, you might get the source code, you get to change it, and you have no obligations about anything else you combine it with. The situation gets stickier when we look at those combinations and the transitions between them. Use GPL code with ...