malvasia bianca

I’ve been meaning for ages to write about Jim Womack’s article on Respect for People, but I don’t seem to be getting around to it, so I’ll mention it here. A TED talk on underwater astonishments; if the beginning doesn’t capture your fancy or you’re short on time, go to the 4:20 mark. Everything you’d […]

Notes from today: 9:00am: Iwata’s Keynote. The part I enjoyed the most was his discussion of Miyamoto’s development style. I wish I’d taken better notes on one slide in particular; a few things he talked about: No design documents. Instead, they depend on personal communication among small teams. They use very focused prototypes. These are […]

More links (and older links) than normal this time: Reader has developed a nasty habit of not showing me all the items with a given tag, so I didn’t realize that I hadn’t posted some of these already. My favorite new blog: Dear Planetary Astronomer Mike. Learn about the history of the earth, or Pluto’s […]

There’s been a lot of discussion of clean code over the last few weeks in mailing lists and blogs that I read: see e.g. this post by Ron Jeffries. Which set up an interesting resonance with this paragraph that I ran across today in David Allen’s latest GTD book: Can you be too organized? Not […]

I finished Spore quite some time ago, but I’ve been putting off blogging about it: it’s a hard game for me to wrap my brain around. Still, a month is long enough to procrastinate, so I suppose I should say something now. I’ll begin from the point of view of a traditional video game player […]

Game | Life on the death of next gen consoles in Japan. The Gallery of Fluid Motion. I like the second one too, though it takes a while to get going. Arlo Belshee on planning without estimating. As with his earlier promiscuous pairing experiments, there’s a lot to think about here… Interesting way to think […]

I claimed that my last post was going to be my last Christopher Alexander post for a while, but I lied. I spend some time today reading Richard Gabriel’s Patterns of Software, the first part of which talks about Alexander’s work (up through the carpets book, which isn’t discussed nearly enough; Gabriel’s book dates from […]

One more Christopher Alexander Nature of Order post, and then I’ll take a break. This is a counterpart to my earlier post about living code (I even repeat some of the examples): this time, I’m focusing on the agile processes that might produce that code. Again, thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped […]

At Agile Open California this year, I didn’t spend all my time thinking about Christopher Alexander (and I owe y’all still more blog posts about that): I also convened a session on Refactoring Writ Large. I put my notes up on the AOC wiki, but here are the examples that motivated it: Consider the following […]

Today’s Nature of Order experiment: see what the characteristics of living structures might look like when applied to software. Many thanks to the Agile Open California participants who helped me think through this; I’ll have a later blog post that talks about agile and living processes. Levels of Scale This is certainly present in the […]

I trust you are all aware of The Big Picture? I thought this one was particularly beautiful. And unrepresentative, in that the pictures are all taken from a single source, the Earth from Above exhibit. My favorite video game business analyst giving an exegesis of a recent Nintendo interview. The backlog as a map. I’ll […]

Hmm, been a while since I’ve done one of these; sorry about the length… Visualizing the Python commit history. Leadership, responsibility, and sausage. Solving sudoku games via package management. Japan, computers, appliances. (Via Niels ‘t Hooft.) Breakpoints as a checklist. Programmers, insecurity, source control. I linked to a movie of strandbeests (amazing wind-powered sculptures that […]

I’d been intending for a while to write a program to help me memorize stuff, most notably Japanese vocabulary. I’d been kind of goofing of for a while, reading much of the Rails book and taking the first few baby steps towards creating the Rails app, but nothing serious. Which is a problem, given that […]

I’m very glad that Michael suggested Grim Fandango as the introductory game for the Vintage Game Club, because adventure games and I go way back. I can’t remember the exact sequence of events, but I’m fairly sure that I was aware of the Colossal Cave adventure before we even owned a computer: I think my […]

I’m rereading The Phenomenon of Life, by Christopher Alexander, in preparation for reading the other books in the series. And, again, I’m blown away by it: if the book contained nothing but the pictures in it, it would be worth it. But, of course, there’s a lot more to the book than pretty (beautiful, profound) […]

Warning: it is entirely possible that none of my regular blog readers will care about this in the slightest. I’m only writing it in case some other random person out there is dealing with this problem and googles for a solution. In particular, if the next paragraph makes your eyes glaze over, just move on, […]

The SuperMemo ideas don’t seem to be leaving my head, and I’ve finally gotten my todo backlog under control, so I think I’ll take a shot at implementing them. Some notes: What algorithm should I use to schedule the reminders? I’ll work under the theory that each item that I want to remember is best […]

Untangle, a flash game about representing graphs as planar with straight edges. (Hmm, are there planar graphs that can’t be drawn with straight edges? Not clear to me.) I linked to another game like this before, but this one’s better. TypeRacer, if you’re curious how fast you type. (I’m usually in the 95-100 wpm range, […]

(Mostly an e-mail to the leandevelopment group, but I figured I might as well stick it here, too.) I just finished reading The Toyota Way, by Jeffrey Liker. Which I highly recommend: it may actually now be my favorite (non-software-specific) lean book. A clear presentation of a good set of principles; I saw a lot […]

I finished reading The Art of Agile Development, by James Shore and Shane Warden a few weeks ago. It’s a quite good book: if you’re looking for a well-written, prescriptive guide for how to do XP, this is what I would recommend. Though I won’t go into the book in general any more than that. […]