Threat level Red. This is a serious, serious problem:
I’m not kidding. Our users are being exposed to applications we don’t control. And it messes things up. You see, the users get exposed to other ways of doing things, ways that are more convenient for users, ways that make them more productive, and they incorrectly think we ought to do things that way for them.
The evidence is mounting:
When I told one of our users, a business analyst, that using just one field for the name meant a huge amount of work for programmers, she actually asked me what our job was, if not to do the work that makes users productive.
And it gets better, so go read.
Proving the obvious. “A news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists.” concludes a BBC article, based on a study comparing ranking sites Reddit, Digg, del.icio.us to TV, radio and other online news sources.
I would tend to think so. Sites designed to surface news that is not already covered to death by the 10 o’clock news, will invariably have different coverage than the 10 o’clock news. But I feel better knowing this issue was thoroughly researched before drawing any conclusions, and will use this link to prove the exception to the rule.
How not to open-source. PJ Hyett asks for a bit more courtesy and much less bad mouthing:
I’m picking on Vlad, but I’ve seen this time and time again with open-source projects and find the attitude unbelievably off-putting as it reflects poorly on the open-source community as a whole. I’m certainly not immune to bad-mouthing projects that I’m not excited about, but I’d like to think that as the years progress that I’m learning to control the emotions that ran rampant when I was 16.
Maybe because the stakes are so small?
Eager to join. The one thing I don’t like about ORM is they hide bad SQL better than politicians hide money. In theory they could get it right, or they do more often then you, and everything is resolved by looking at the query log and hand patching slow queries. In practice, we have little empirical evidence in support of this theory.
Anyway, Gabe da Silveira unearths an issue involving ActiveRecord eager loading and limits, something I’ve seen before but didn’t understand as well, and proposes a solution.
Test me a story, part II. Can’t believe I missed this before. Dan North on stories. Not the one you tell your kids, the one you test against:
Behaviour-driven development is an “outside-in†methodology. It starts at the outside by identifying business outcomes, and then drills down into the feature set that will achieve those outcomes. Each feature is captured as a “storyâ€, which defines the scope of the feature along with its acceptance criteria. This article introduces the BDD approach to defining and identifying stories and their acceptance criteria.
Doesn’t seem to work for me, but next on my todo list.
Above, adding some spice to the otherwise boring SF mayor re-election campaign.
http://www.stephenduncanjr.com/
Assaf