I have not had much time for blogging lately. Terribly busy with getting the ZeroBUGS code up to snuff, fixing bugs, preparing my speech for the first D Developers' Conference, and Real Life (tm) in general.
The Conference (sponsored by Amazon.com, and organized by amazonian extraordinaire Brad Roberts) was a great success. See here and here.
The third day of the conference was a hands-on session of language design. Most of the stuff that Andrei Alexandrescu and Walter Bright drew on the whiteboard went way over my head. Thomas Kuhne sat next to me and quickly hacked his demangler for the D Language, to better integrate with my debugger.
Cool ideas for the future of the language and its support libraries filled the air, so I would not be surprised if by next year's conference the D Programming Language makes it into mainstream.
Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Thursday, January 25, 2007
The Steve Yegge Factor
Who is Steve Yegge? Oh, just some guy I did not meet while I was working for Amazon, either because my short (two and a half years, from April 2001 to November 03) tenure has not overlapped with his, or maybe just because I do not seek the benevolent companionship of self-appointed software rock stars. Who knows?
While I agree with some of his views on the Agile Process, I am not sure that I fancy his style, for several reasons:
I know from experience that blogging and participating in forums while enjoying a glass of wine inevitably leads to my offending someone needlessly (I have done it more times than I would like to admit, and trust me: I love my reds).
Arguing over development processes (and programming languages, and OS-es) gets people so worked up to the point it becomes a huge time sink, a distraction from what I like doing best, which is writing code. Sometimes I would rather not say what I truly think.
Agile is a necessary evil because it keeps management happy and deluded, thinking they have a grip over the development process (and thus less dangerous).
And finally, why tell people the truth on Agile? Society needs dumb people. If everybody smartens up overnight, then who's gonna pick the garbage? Not Pinocchio, I hear he wants to be a real boy now.
While I agree with some of his views on the Agile Process, I am not sure that I fancy his style, for several reasons:
I know from experience that blogging and participating in forums while enjoying a glass of wine inevitably leads to my offending someone needlessly (I have done it more times than I would like to admit, and trust me: I love my reds).
Arguing over development processes (and programming languages, and OS-es) gets people so worked up to the point it becomes a huge time sink, a distraction from what I like doing best, which is writing code. Sometimes I would rather not say what I truly think.
Agile is a necessary evil because it keeps management happy and deluded, thinking they have a grip over the development process (and thus less dangerous).
And finally, why tell people the truth on Agile? Society needs dumb people. If everybody smartens up overnight, then who's gonna pick the garbage? Not Pinocchio, I hear he wants to be a real boy now.
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