http://niksilver.com Mostly about the management of software development Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:15:35 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en A couple of weeks ago I presented at the Agile Business Conference 2009. Thanks to all those at the DSDM Consortium who made it such a great event. The theme of the conference was how Agile can help in adversity (e.g. an economic downturn), and I provided a case study ... http://niksilver.com/2009/10/28/being-agile-and-open-for-a-stronger-business/ Today I attended the launch of something weird and wonderful: a new musical instrument, the Eigenharp. And although this is a hardware device the event, and the run up to it, brought to mind the launch of our own Open Platform six months ago. By seeing some commonalities between the ... http://niksilver.com/2009/10/07/the-eigenharp-openness-and-launching-something-really-new/ A quick thanks to the folks at ProgrammableWeb for making my Guardian Tag Bubbles app their Mashup of the Day. It was terrific to see it up there with the likes of the imaginative The Sheep Market and Again But Slower -- to pick just two at random. http://niksilver.com/2009/09/17/thanks-to-programmableweb/ I was by turns initially horrified and puzzled when I read Ryan Sholin's piece on "How to manage technology decisions in 5 easy steps". Horrified because they seemed at odds with my own experiences of what works and what doesn't, and then puzzled because Ryan is someone with a great ... http://niksilver.com/2009/09/14/a-health-warning-to-followers-of-the-knight-news-challenge/ I've been reading a bit about lean working recently, and this is a bit about what I've learned. Lean software development is a fascinating step on from Agile, but its history is in manufacturing cars and to date I've only been reading up on lean manufacturing, not lean development. There are ... http://niksilver.com/2009/09/10/a-few-things-i-know-about-lean/ I've spent a while learning JavaFX and developing an application which is now live. I've written about the application itself over on the Guardian's Open Platform blog, because it makes use of the Open Platform's Content API. But in this blog post I want to write less about the application ... http://niksilver.com/2009/08/31/discovering-javafx-with-the-guardian-open-platform/ My public service for today is that of matchmaker, and specifically finding a match for the many online commentators who have a start-up-shaped solution for newspapers' current crisis of faith and future. Over on Mashable, Vadim Lavrusik has a useful round-up of "12 things newspapers should do to survive". It's good ... http://niksilver.com/2009/08/23/never-mind-google-this-is-for-you/ There isn't too much I can add to Kevin Anderson's extensive coverage of Guardian Hack Day 2 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. But here are a couple of things... First, huge congratulations to Matt McAlister and the whole organising team. Hack Day 1 set the bar pretty high, but the ... http://niksilver.com/2009/08/02/guardian-hack-day-2/ [I don't usually post very technical material here, and apologies if you're after higher level discussion, but it seemed the most appropriate place for this.] I was quite thrilled last night to have solved a really frustrating bug in a piece of open source software. First the background, then the problem ... http://niksilver.com/2009/05/06/solved-annoying-javafx-eclipse-plugin-problem/ Last week I attended QCon London 2009, which was characteristically excellent -- and I know my colleagues who attended thought the same. Most excitingly this year two of the Guardian development team were invited to give presentations on our most recent work building a large content management system for a ... http://niksilver.com/2009/03/18/qcon-london-2009-a-few-lessons-learned/