tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-83557282011-12-14T18:52:02.472-08:00A compilation of thoughts and rants on software development from a 12 year veteran of the software industry.Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comBlogger211100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1115158924512839692005-05-03T15:11:00.000-07:002005-05-03T15:22:04.513-07:00

It's strange to me that people still have such violent reactions to Macs. I like 'em because when I use one I think less about the computer I'm using and more about what I'm trying to do. I'm sure there are certain types of work where the Mac would get in the way, mostly likely in the enterprise space.

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1100184755701328532004-11-11T06:23:00.000-08:002004-11-11T06:56:30.153-08:00

I've never worked on an agile development project, but I like a lot of the ideas - iterations, focus on communication, unit testing. From what I've read it is not big on up front planning. This is problematic when trying to start a new project. The stakeholders want to know when you're going to have a prototype or proof-of-concept. Uh oh, you don't know what user stories you can get into the

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1099676081766601652004-11-05T09:32:00.000-08:002004-11-05T09:34:41.766-08:00

First, I'm not talking about Ruby on mobile devices. I'm talking about being able to program in Ruby from anywhere. As a developer I've always been resigned to the fact that I'd be tied to a specific machine (laptop or desktop). I couldn't just go off and borrow someone elses computer to do some development without installing runtimes, ide's, editors, libraries, etc. Then this morning I

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1099590156444366192004-11-04T09:26:00.000-08:002004-11-11T07:03:19.080-08:00

Are people inherently: Good or Bad? Smart or Dumb? These assumptions, like all assumptions, will frame any judgement you make. If you believe people are inherently smart, you'll get out of their way and let them do their thing. If you believe people are inherently dumb, you will be inclined to "help" people by deciding for them. Good, you'll get out of their way. Bad, you'll put up controls and

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1098906546037119612004-10-27T13:06:00.000-07:002004-10-27T12:49:06.036-07:00

All right, for the first time in a while I'm really excited about learning a new technology. I ordered Programming Ruby from Amazon. I've been agonizing over learning Python or Ruby. Python with Zope and Plone and its maturity was appealing especially as I was thinking about using it on a real project. Ruby was really a dark horse because I was and still am a little leary about its support

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1098372181093261552004-10-21T08:15:00.000-07:002004-10-21T08:23:01.093-07:00

If I were starting an engineering team, I'd want source control, a bug tracker, a blogger (I think), and a wiki (I thnk). Seems like most teams would too. Anyone know of an ASP package that has this. If I have a small team, I want them focusing on the product, not this stuff. I don't want to buy and manage yet another machine either. Filesharing and backup could be simply managed under the

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1097687415456024432004-10-13T10:04:00.000-07:002005-05-03T14:50:29.486-07:00

Man, I see all this stuff about RSS and podcasting and I can't help but be reminded of push. RSS lets you subscribe to information streams such as news, blogs, audio blogs (podcasting), and I'm sure video will be next. Sure it's a useful tool in the way HTML is a useful tool. I think all these aggregators are going to go the way of the HTML editors. They'll be a couple high end ones that have a

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1097679927047357232004-10-13T07:46:00.000-07:002004-10-13T08:05:27.046-07:00

Wow, I feel like an industry pundit. Just have a blog and throw out some inflammatory statement. Now all I have to do is blather on about how Open Source, SOA, XML, et al. are the death nell of Microsoft hegemony (dictionary.com is getting a workout :). This one VC is so sure of Microsoft's decline that he's selling all his Microsoft stock. Well, I don't know if Microsoft will become

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1097256119048748932004-10-08T10:07:00.000-07:002004-10-08T10:21:59.050-07:00

Just saw the announcement of a company called SpikeSource. They have productized LAMP and LAMJ stacks. What the heck is a LAMP or LAMJ stack? Well, I found that LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PERL/PHP/Python and I'm guessing the J in LAMJ is Java. So what they do is give you an installer for the whole stack on the systems they support. If I were a business and not a developer that

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1097083237050807212004-10-06T09:52:00.000-07:002004-10-06T10:20:37.050-07:00

A lot of entrepreneurs and management types have been hyping this article in Fast Company entitled Balance is Bunk! The paragraph that struck me the most was: But the balance movement is fatally flawed. For those of us trying desperately to keep up with everything that needs doing, it poses two mythical ideals. If we work hard enough at it, one goes, we can have everything. Or if we cut back, we

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1096932136969074152004-10-04T16:09:00.000-07:002004-10-04T16:22:16.970-07:00

Well, I missed posting on Friday which was kinda bums me out. I was a little under the weather (worse now), but the primary reason was the power went out at work so I didn't have any time to post since when I got home where there was power, I had to do some work. The power went out at about Noon. The chirpping of UPSes could be heard throughout the building. Almost like camping. After about

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1096551376456930172004-09-30T06:11:00.000-07:002004-09-30T06:36:16.456-07:00

Opps, I missed yesterday's entry. I'm a little bummed, but I'll get over it. I was busy working, but I spent a couple minutes fooling around with Bloglines and del.icio.us. I think I'm behind the curve on these two, but they both look like they'll be useful tools in my information gathering, storing, and retrieval arsenal. I've seen the various newsfeed links on web sites for quite a while,

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1096403907134330292004-09-28T13:21:00.000-07:002004-09-28T13:38:27.133-07:00

Grrr, I'm sifting through some code that is a mile long, has inconsistent tab/spacing, inconsistent indenting, etc. and it is really a pain. From a readability and understandability standpoint it's nearly impossible. Testability? No way! Long ago, I remember reading arguements against coding standards suggesting that they inhibited programming because it interfered with the creativity of the

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1096307533970929772004-09-27T10:37:00.000-07:002004-09-27T10:52:13.970-07:00

Dave Astels has a entry today Why Your Code Sucks. It's a good run down of things that make code crappy. It turns out pretty much all the code I've ever written sucks. I should probable take a little offense to this, but I'm not that sensitive about my code. Besides, I've written some code that has made my employers some good money, and myself by extension. For the most part I've always

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1096041853964774172004-09-24T07:32:00.000-07:002004-09-24T09:04:13.966-07:00

Back for more? I know everyone likes trilogies, but I'm hoping that part two does it for this subject, I'm not sure yet. Now that we understand what I understand about the problem I can talk about where I stand on the subject. Feel free to fire back if I've gotten anything wrong, especially anything factual. Be warned, it might cause the dreaded part 3. My introduction to this discussion

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095973189146657272004-09-23T08:17:00.000-07:002004-09-23T13:59:49.146-07:00

Now, if you're like me, I'm sure you're saying, "Uh oh, this guy is already titling his entry Part 1. What kinda long winded BS is he going to shovel at me? He's not doing some expose, he's just writing a blog." Exactly, I'm just writing a blog and I know this subject is going to take a bunch of time and space so I'm going to need to break it up. Since this is a blog, it's not going to be

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095866492380554262004-09-22T07:48:00.000-07:002004-09-22T08:21:32.380-07:00

Remember when companies were trying to make and sell products based on applets and Java 1.1.x? Remember when people were trying to push "push" on us? Man, those were the good old days. Not because people were trying to sell us crap, but because there were lots of people working on the bleeding edge; trying to create the next big thing on technology that was trying to prove it was more than

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095778487377973452004-09-21T07:44:00.000-07:002004-09-21T07:54:47.376-07:00

Well, what are you supposed to do on one of these things when you have no on-topic burning issues. I don't want to get into the habit of not posting (for me one non-weekend day of not posting will probably lead to n-more and the death of this blog). So, I'll do what any good developer would do, write some code. Actually, you're supposed to write a test first, rigtht? ;) And technically, this

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095659862287260882004-09-19T22:50:00.000-07:002004-09-20T09:22:26.046-07:00

I was reading a blog entry on how startups might be able to use statistics to build a successful team, similar to the way Billy Beane did to build the A's. I'm a baseball fan so I really respect what the A's have done as far as getting the most for their money. I'm also an engineer who's been at 2 startups and 2 small companies so this melding of the two intrigues me. How much responsibility did

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095444630586844792004-09-17T10:32:00.000-07:002004-09-17T11:10:30.586-07:00

Ever want to record a voice message to your email? Browse the internet in your text editor? No?!?! You must be an idiot. At least that's what some marketing guy must have told engineering. From the user side of things they are called bloatware or feature creep. They can make the product heavy and are often no more useful than filling the bullet points on a product sheet. From the development

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8355728.post-1095367002865196232004-09-16T13:32:00.000-07:002004-09-16T14:30:02.153-07:00

It's hard to surf the landscape of programming web sites without running into an article about XP (eXtreme Programming for those you who don't surf landscapes). I'll admit that when I first ran across XP I was sucked in. Development without the requirements rigamarole? No spec writing? Just write the code! Sign me up! Well, of course this isn't what XP is about, but I think it appeals to the

Brian Yamabehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07878879988039743873noreply@blogger.com