Refactoring to Patterns

Whee! I just received Refactoring to Patterns (ISBN: 0321213351)
It seems nice but as an introduction Joshua Kerievsky talks about the GoF and Refactoring.
I haven't read them (yet), hope this won't be a problem to understand...

Rule engine

Really interesting James Ross'post

...this one uses a business rule engine (drools) to allow you to declare in a text file your idea of good taste and enforce it for your code base.

There's also macker that seems to do the same.
Currently I haven't test any of them... but that might be a solution go produce great code not just good code.

XUL Amazon sample application

You can find a sample application of xul apply to amazon on this site. (need mozilla or firefox)
I've tried xul once but I put it aside because:

• the xul documentation wasn't clear (and not always up-to-date)
• It seems to me it use a lot of javascript (and I don't like javascript that much)

But this example makes me want to give it an other try...

XP Quote

If members of a team don't care about each other and what they are doing, XP won't work.
If members of a team don't care about a project, nothing can save it.
-- Kent Beck

Scrum overview

Since I like XP I wanted to know other agile process.
I found this short summary of scrum.
Good introduction at least for a beginning ;-)

Google suggest beta

Nice new feature at Google (still in beta but it will certainly go to mainstream)

PicoContainer Birth

Nice story about Pico birth.

Anti-Productivity Pod

Nice post about anti-productivity at work.

It's true you often get things done early in the morning or late in the evening.
The rest of the day you get interrupted by many things (phone, icq, mail, meetings, people dropping by...)
But if you want communication amongst people, interruption is certainly an inevitable drawback.

To avoid such things I see some solutions:

• If someone drops by, evaluate if it's urgent, if not finish your current task and go find that person afterward
• When I want to concentrate to get something done, I sometimes turn off Outlook...
• Meetings should mainly be standup meetings
• Try to organize your tasks with priorities and stick to them (not always easy)

C++ IoC explanation

For those (still) using C++ ... joking ;-)
http://www.objectmentor.com/resources/articles/dip.pdf
A pattern that might change your life!

Ward Cunningham on TheServerSide.NET

I didn't know microsoft hired him...

Few quotes I found interesting:

I do know that a lot of times if the programmer gets good, while he is getting good, he learns that most people do not understand what he does. So that's really separating for programmers. Programmers are kind of driven apart by that realization that they are dealing with things that most people do not understand, and after a while they give up trying to communicate.

I often find it hard, even among developpers, to communicate and understand each others. Unfortunatly I don't think computers are the only place where people find it hard to exchange ideas...

Architecture design is so important we have to do it all the time. There is a little resistance to doing it before we're sure what to design, especially producing what is called the big design up front where you write a document and then someone tries to hold you to that design; "We don't care if you made a mistake, we want you do what you said." That is foolishness, but there is no resistance to thinking.

There is resistance to "if I have kind of an idea how this is going to go and you have kind of an idea how this is going to go, instead of having the argument today let us just to do the part we need to do today, that [part] we agree on and we will wait tomorrow to see what we have to do [then]. If we need to have an argument tomorrow, it will be about tomorrow's stuff.

Good wisdom ;-)

Full Interview: http://www.theserverside.net/talks/index.tss