Archive for 2006

Guardian Unlimited is hiring a Development Manager

If you’re interested in the kind of work we’re doing here at Guardian Unlimited, then you might be interested in joining us. We’re looking for a Development Manager. As an experiment I put an ad on Google Base (now expired). Here’s the text in full… Guardian Unlimited is embarking on a concentrated effort to expand … Continue reading »

A new Travel site, and four uses for tags

Here at Guardian Unlimited we’ve just launched our new Travel site. You’ll be able to read a lot about it in the industry press, but I just wanted to write a little what we’ve done from a technical-managerial point of view. The project motivation is ideal The main strands of our business are editorial, commercial … Continue reading »

Javascript puzzler: throw null

I know this isn’t really the place to post code, and I’m sorry. But this is why I don’t like loosely typed languages. I was caught by a Javascript nasty earlier this week (no I don’t code professionally, this was for fun) which boils down to the code below. What you think could happen here…? … Continue reading »

Measuring development is useful, up to a point

There’s a post from Joel O’Software regarding measuring performance and productivity. He’s saying some good stuff about how these metrics don’t work, but I’d like to balance it with a few further words in favour of metrics generally. Individual productivity metrics don’t work, but some metrics are still useful, including team metrics which you might … Continue reading »

Quality is a bogus variable

Quality seems to be widely misunderstood. People often talk about quality being a key variable that a project team can choose to alter to reshape their project — along with other variables such as cost, scope and time. I think that view is flawed. Meanwhile Mishkin Berteig is not unusual when he says “I have … Continue reading »

The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part V of V, evolving the product

Previously I wrote: Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. [...] What, I wondered to myself, were the benefits of OO … Continue reading »

The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part IV of V, refactoring

Previously I wrote: Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. [...] What, I wondered to myself, were the benefits of OO … Continue reading »

The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part III of V, better testability

Previously I wrote: Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. [...] What, I wondered to myself, were the benefits of OO … Continue reading »

The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part II of V, separation of concerns

Previously I wrote: Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. [...] What, I wondered to myself, were the benefits of OO … Continue reading »

The benefits of OO aren’t obvious: Part I of V, data hiding

Sometimes you work with something for so long that you forget that other people aren’t familiar with it. This happened recently talking to a friend of mine — “I’ve got no need for object orientation”, he said, and I was shocked. Yet I couldn’t easily explain why I thought OO was far superior to procedural … Continue reading »