Jeff Jarvis has a typically provocative post, saying that newspapers should outsource their technology. Lloyd has already responded saying that there’s more to journalism than news-gathering, and previous technological mistakes should not close the door on future successes. Here’s my response. In this article: My summary of the piece on Buzzmachine; Argument 1 against Jeff: … Continue reading
The traditional way to track a project budget (which is to say, the way I learnt to do it first) is to track the time people spend on the project each day and add it up. I call this bottom-up budget tracking. Agile forces an alternative approach, which I call top-down. I was involved in … Continue reading
A quick plug for guardian.co.uk’s software architect Mat Wall. He gave an interview to Software Engineering Radio, and they’ve just put up the podcast. It’s a bit hardcore techie at times, and all the better for that. Even if you’re not hardcore techie yourself Mat and co-interviewee Erik Doernenburg provide a really good feel for … Continue reading
I’ve just finished a fortnight’s holiday which I (foolishly) spent mostly in front of a PC developing a never-ending little application. But unexpectedly, despite the trivial nature of my project, I rediscovered a number of important lessons more usually associated with serious application development. The software I’m writing is a just a little Firefox plugin. … Continue reading
There were very few moments for me during QCon London 2008 of earth-shaking enlightenment — if any. But every hour of the three days of the conference there were insights and guidance that could be tucked away, and reused later to save hours, days or weeks of time elsewhere. Snake-oil salesmen where thin on the … Continue reading
At the weekend the Guardian website went through one of the most significant transformations in its history: we moved our news, politics and Observer content into the new design and new content management system, and we simultaneously launched a lot of new functionality, both internal and external. There’s an introduction and discussion on the more … Continue reading
While I’m usually proud of the work I’m involved with, I’m rarely happy for long. There are always ways to improve, and I’m usually dissatisfied by one unmet ideal or another. Almost since I started in this field I’ve been vexed by how much of web development is “urgent” rather than “important”. This is not … Continue reading
I thought I’d answer a question that comes up from time to time about the Java development and redesign work going on for the Guardian Unlimited site: “Why didn’t you write it in Ruby?” I was reminded of this question because of an excellent post over at Manageability.org in which ceperez wonders aloud whether dynamic … Continue reading
I was surprised to see Ken Schwaber talking about burn-down charts, as burn-up charts provide more information and are — for me — the preferred option. So this is a short article about burn-up charts and burn-down charts, both great tools for measuring progress. First, though, a hat-tip to Ian Carroll, a colleague at MEN … Continue reading
