Comments for niksilver.com

Comment on When board leaders fail to grasp technology by liz sarginson

liz sarginson — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 13:41:57 +0000

I heard that programme and was similarly incensed, particularly by Luke Johnson’s almost petulant outburst against IT. You make the point well that Board directors, while more often recognising how much their company’s depend on technology, fail to see it as incumbent on them to understand even the basic concepts. Well said.

Comment on Writing in Javascript for Palm’s webOS platform by stickywhipit

stickywhipit — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 02:30:57 +0000

first, thanks for the app, yours is one of 3 RTM (one has died, though) apps for the palmpre. i really like it, as well as the fact that it is gpl, i like it’s simple interface and the fact that you can see a bunch of tasks on the screen without having to look in multiple places or scroll the screen even.

there are several enhancements that i would like to make because i use priorities, categories, and notes, and like to sort in different ways at different times. so, i will gladly offer my time to make the coding changes as soon as i have some time freed up from my other development efforts.

but thanks for the great beginning!

Comment on Discovering JavaFX with the Guardian Open Platform by William

William — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 09:48:25 +0000

Hmm, I tried it on a Mac, and it wasn’t so bad. I did have to click two OK buttons to install JavaFX (which took under ten seconds) — but if I didn’t have Flash installed, I’d get the equivalent prompts.

Comment on An ABC of R2: J is for JFDI by Nik

Nik — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:48:43 +0000

Hi Paul. We do still have a team dedicated to quick turnaround work (including bugfixing), but to be honest JFDI was never their official name outside the team.

Comment on An ABC of R2: J is for JFDI by Paul Lomax

Paul Lomax — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:36:40 +0000

Hi Nick,

I forgot to ask you last time I was at King’s Place – do you still have a “JFDI” team? And do you still call them that??

Cheers

Paul

Comment on Discovering JavaFX with the Guardian Open Platform by zammbi

zammbi — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 08:52:23 +0000

10^80 atoms in the universe

Hopefully Java 7 helps solve some of the problems you have listed.

Comment on A few things I know about lean by Nik

Nik — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 17:18:27 +0000

Hi Rupert. Having oversight from beginning to end is part of being lean, although just saying the developer should put it live doesn’t make it lean of course. Just as important (possibly more so) is the team working together, and continually putting the features live. If the developer happens to be the last person in the chain that’s fine; in the lean world that go-live action should be a continuously repeating step that’s part of a flow.

Comment on A few things I know about lean by Rupert

Rupert — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:50:33 +0000

Interesting stuff. The ideas surely apply beyond the actual production of the software to the processes involved in moving it into production. The way we work usually results in the developer being the one responsible for putting code live, which has caused a few raised eyebrows over the years, but does have a number of benefits, notably that if there are problems the developer is probably the person best placed to diagnose and fix them. This would seem to resonate with the ideas you’ve outlined in this post.

Comment on A health warning to followers of the Knight News Challenge by Nik

Nik — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:28:09 +0000

Hi Ryan. Thanks for the further insight. I do realise it’s impossible to condense all the subtleties down into a few soundbites. But then it’s also always fascinating to hear many of the details of the kind you outline above, especially when it’s on a project which has become public, because then an observer can compare their assumptions with the reality.

Comment on A health warning to followers of the Knight News Challenge by Ryan Sholin

Ryan Sholin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 01:48:58 +0000

Hi Nik — Thanks for the feedback! I’m glad someone stopped and actually read the post instead of just retweeting it. A lot of that going around.

First of all, as in all things on the Web, your mileage may vary. But yes, my list at the Knight News Challenge blog was definitely geared toward entrants into that particular blender of funding and ideas.

In my case, I had some experience working with developers and some experience doing very lightweight development myself. I’m an edge case. But I’ve noticed that a few of my fellow News Challenge winners tend to be edge cases themselves. So that’s the audience I was preaching to in that particular post.

To your points:

1. If you’re on a larger team, congratulations. You either know what you’re doing already, or you have enough padding in your grant to make a few mistakes. That’s good! Fail fast, and move on to the next iteration.

2. You’re absolutely right. In the case of the second version of ReportingOn, I spent somewhere in the neighborhood of 8 hours (over the course of a few meetings) in a room with my development duo, with one of them standing in front of a whiteboard guiding the discussion, figuring out what I had in mind, and all of us having some very vivid conversations about the details. I’ve boiled that down to “telling them what you want” because if you’re not willing to put in the time to make your vision clear to your team, you’re not going to get anything out of the exercise that resembles what you imagined.

But by all means, don’t mistake what I’ve learned from experience as a general prescription! If your mileage doesn’t vary in one way or another, then something’s gone horribly wrong here.