A few words on rewriting and migrating systems, based on experience. This is because the painful rejuvination of Delicious under Avos is very much at the front of my mind right now — I’m both a user caught in the backwash, and also an industry professional who’s dealt with these things before. While Chad and … Continue reading
A couple of things happened recently bringing home something that I’ve found increasingly important: technology decisions are social. Social decisions in software architecture The other day in conversation about team structures the Guardian’s lead software architect, Mat Wall, mentioned that architecture is social. This is a good, and often disregarded, observation. In that context he … Continue reading
Previously I’ve talked about estimation, using an example of a project that we were very confident would make a certain amount of revenue. The slight flaw in this approach is that “very confident” varies depending on who’s making the estimate. So here is a proposal for an application to train the user in consistent estimation. … Continue reading
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 very large website. I don’t … Continue reading
…which Mat Wall and I have written about extensively before, However, for this piece let me say this… When you have a huge number of people for whom you are building software (1500 staff, 20 million unique users, and an entire wired economy influencing which way you should go next) then simply following instructions is … Continue reading
A recent conversation with a colleague got me thinking about so-called “lightweight” systems, and when they become more trouble then they’re worth. He was frustrated by some problems he was having; even more so, he explained, because he thought he was dealing with something that was “lightweight”. It’s a seductive word, and sometimes — as … Continue reading
Sometimes you can trust too much. Wherever I’ve worked I’ve been involved in a few examples where we listened to the customer, trusted them to know what they wanted, given it to them, and they’ve regretted it. We have delivered anti-features. Most recently at Guardian Unlimited our (previous) homepage had clever layout rules whose logic … Continue reading
An aphorism I heard recently seems to be particularly memorable: “there’s nothing so permanent as temporary”. However, it wasn’t originally referring to software — it comes from a builder who is rebuilding the kitchen of friends. He’s from Azerbaijan, and my friends are fond of quoting him in full, to give the words maximum colour: … Continue reading
Today we’ve launched three new sites on Guardian Unlimited. Well, more correctly, we’ve redesigned and rebuilt our Science, Technology and Environment sites. Working for a media organisation, I can rely on people much more articulate than me to tell the stories better — see Alok Jha on Science, Alison Benjamin on Environment and (with more … Continue reading
“Quick and dirty” is a weapon that’s often deployed by people for getting themselves out of a tight spot. But like any weapon, in the wrong hands it can backfire badly. Technical people use techie quick and dirty solutions in their work. Those people we like to work so closely with — our clients — … Continue reading
