Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene #62
26 Mar
- This Eric Lippert post really hits home for me. It is always way more complicated to get something done than you first think. That was a big lesson of my first year here. Starting here, I was as guilty as the next non-tech poster of saying "Why can’t they just do <some feature> over the weekend? Heck, I could knock it out in a day". While things around here aren’t quite as Kafka-esque as at Microsoft, the point is definitely the same — there’s tons and tons of things that need to happen after that the"I could do that in and afternoon" code actually gets written. Writing code is an actually the easiest and one of the smallest portions of actually getting a feature into the product. This isn’t, of course, to say that we don’t get new features done — obviously we do — but it is to say that getting that feature done takes a lot more work than merely knocking out some code and checking it in to SVN.
- I read this post, and immediately bought this book. The list of facts and fallacies was just too compelling not to buy it and give it a read. I always like a book that busts conventional wisdom. And who doesn’t like a book fully of short, truthful statements that get explained later? ;-)
- One thing I’ve learned: There isn’t a direct correlation between the desktop OS market and the developer tools market for that Desktop OS.
- Interesting. This article — Practical UML™: A Hands-On Introduction for Developers — is by a very large factor the most popular technical article on CDN. I mean like by a factor of five or six times. It must be a popular link on Google somehow for people looking into UML.
Ya, except that MS is quickly becoming more are more top heavy and is spending ever more time deciding how to get something done rather than actually getting it done. A system can go to far, and MS is definitely into the twilight territory now.
Which explains why even now there are zero "power toys" for vista and the ultimate extras program has been an ultimate failure.
There has to be a balance between procedure and performance.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:17 pmPractical UML : this article certainly deserves it. But I still wonder whether UML is that much used by Delphi developers for their projects, beyond the ECO adepts. Aside from pure UML presentation subjects, you seldom see even a Class Diagram in the articles, the books, the .SWF movies, the conference slides or the Delphi help. This seems not to be the case for the Java or C# communities where UML is used, at least in the presentation articles. We use UML all the time, for papers, training and development, and are grateful that Delphi added the modeling features.
March 26th, 2008 at 9:53 pmI’ll wager the Practical UML article takes a measurable popularity jump after showing up here. Excellent tutorial. Guess this is one case where popularity parallels quality.
March 27th, 2008 at 1:39 pmNick,
What’s happened to http://homepages.codegear.com??
It’s simply does not load (i tried the domain index, jvcl homepage, and some others).
It’s just me or there is a problem?
March 28th, 2008 at 5:41 am