How to broadcast your Google Reader ’starred items’ to an RSS feed or widget on your blog
This post explains how to share your Favorite (starred) items in Google Reader via either an RSS feed or as a widget on your blog.  This is something I am  interested in, as these weekly linkage posts are essential a summary of my starred items in Google Reader for that week.  Although not all my Friday Linkage links come form Google Reader but it would cover most of the interesting blog posts.

Playing in Traffic
David’s well titled post on generating traffic on your website in a classy manner e.g. not through buzz word bingo is well worth a read.  Especially if you are interested in increasing your traffic while retaining your credibility.  His portfolio of photographs is also well worth a browse.

Unit Testing: One Test, One Assertion – Why It Works
This post makes the case for one assertion per unit test.  As relative beginner to unit testing and as someone who tends to have multiple assertions per test I find this an interesting idea which I think I will need to try out.

The Psychology of Passive Barriers: Why Your Friends Don’t Save Money, Eat Healthier, or Clean Their Garages
Ever wondered why people don’t do things that are clearly beneficial for themselves?  This post discusses some of the Psychology of this phenomenon.  Although this is not specifically about software engineering, it is talking about an important aspect of user interaction: motivating/compelling the user to do something.

Actively Avoid Insights: 4 Useful KPI Measurement Techniques
This article on Web Analytics discusses four commonly used measurement techniques: averages, percentages, ratios and compound metrics and how they can actually hinder your understanding of your progress against your goals unless they are applied with some thought.

Design Patterns

Design patterns are recyclable solutions to a software design problems and are an essential way to share design experience between designers without each designer having to discover the patterns themselves.  Patterns are not however concrete implementations of solutions like a library they are higher level design concepts and whose implementation should be customised to fit the needs of the situation e.g. if you were to use the same pattern a hunderd times you may well end up with a hunderd different implementations.

Anti-Patterns

Anti-patterns are the opposite of design patterns they describe negative patterns in software design, programming, project management, organisational behavior and other areas of development.  The main focus of anti-patterns is their detection and removal, not their implementation!  Most anti-patterns consist of an definition of symptoms and a guide to refactoring or otherwise removing or reforming the anti-pattern into something more positive.

The Bad Apples: Group Posion

Jeff Atwood discusses the surprisingly dramatic effect that a ‘bad apple’ workers can have on their teams chances of success.  The research his post is based on is quite eye opening, the potential effects of a ‘bad apple’ on a team are much more dramatic than I would have expected.  It is especially interesting to find out that the rest of the team starts to mimic the traits of the ‘bad apple’ after prolonged exposure, which makes an even stronger case for reforming or removing the ‘bad apple’ as soon as they are identified.

NTFS-3G

NTFS-3G is a free NTFS driver for Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X, NetBSD, Solaris, Haiku, and some other operating systems.  It allows these operating systems to both read and write to NTFS hard drive partitions used by Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 2000, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008  systems.

MacFUSE

MacFUSE extends Mac OS X’s native file system to be able to use third party file systems written on top of MacFUSE’s SDK.  Combined with the NTFS-3G driver this allows Mac OS X to finally be able to read and write to NTFS file partitions.  This means that NTFS can finally be used for boot camp and VM ware installations on Macs.

Failure as an indication of progress
This post features a great video about Honda’s Indycar racing experience and how they have an attitude that you have to fail to push the envelope.  This is something I can understand, as I recently started learning to ice skate to play ice hockey.  I noticed quickly that there are two schools of thought about falling: the first is that it is a bad shameful thing and the second is that it is necessary to find out where your limits are.  Without regular failures it is very hard to continue to improve, nothing focuses the mind like working out what went wrong.

Stop bouncing: tips for website success
This post is a great introduction to using the Google Analytics service to guide improvements to your website with the aim of helping to retain visitors to your website.  If you find the article useful I would highly recommend the authors personal Analytics blog ‘Occam’s Razor‘.

Patterns & principles help me sleep!
David’s post about the effects of truely understanding and using design patterns and principles as opposed to memorising them for buzz word bingo purposes.  As I am currently swatting up on design patterns in preparation to teaching a short course about them in two weeks, I found this post fairly encouraging.

Are you throwing away readers by posting at the wrong time?
An interesting post on when to time your blog posting, as someone who already schedules their posts to publish at a certain time (01:00 PST) I found this a quite interesting read and something I will need to think about when I schedule my posts more.

World of Warcraft is the new ‘third place’
It is very interesting to see a computer game being listed as a ‘third place‘, with over ten million players I guess it really is a global community now.

ASP.Net MVC: Release Candidate One
This week Microsoft released an official release candidate for their ASP.Net MVC framework.  Check out this blog post for a list of whats has changed.  ASP.Net MVC has been in beta for a while and I’ve been trying to wait patiently for a more concrete release before trying it out myself.  Mostly so that if I do like it and use it for a project that I then don’t have to do much rewriting if the API changes between beta and release.  So I will hopefully get some time to try this framework out in the next month.

Apanta Studio
Apanta Studio is a web development IDE which is completely free and based on the Eclipse platform.  I was inquiring about a decent php and python editor and had this package recommended to me so it is also on my ever expanding list of things to try out.  It also supports AJAX, Ruby on Rails, CSS and HTML editing so unless I end up deciding to write my sites in ASP.Net I will most likely be spending a lot of time getting to know this package.

Read the Diffs
Eric makes an interesting suggestion about reading the diffs of the changes your co-workers made the day before every morning.  This sounds like a good way of keeping up with what your co-workers are doing, helping improve code consistency and you may well learn something cool as well.

Can you cure copy & paste disease?
I think any experienced programmer has encountered the horror of a code base that has massive amounts of code copy & pasted around inside it.  Mass usage of copy and paste is generally a bad idea: especially if the person doing it does not fully understand what the code they are copying actually does.  This post discusses the idea of disabling or limiting the usage of copy & paste and if it would improve code quality which is an interesting idea.

Winston Churchill’s Daily Routine
I found this really interesting given all that Churchill achieved during his life to see his daily routine.  Being British he is one of our national heroes for leading the country through the dark years of the Second World War.  I wonder if the routine mentioned in this post covers the years during World War One and Two?

Launch Bar (Mac OS X)

One thing I noticed when I switched from using Windows PCs at home to using Macs was that there did not seem to be an obvious equivalent to using the run command (Windows Key + R) to open directories, URLs and launching programs.  The built in Spotlight application can launch applications in a manner similar to run but not open applications or URLs.  Launch Bar is a Mac only application that addresses this and adds extra features like a calculator, targeted Google searches (maps, general, groups etc) to allow you to access any file or application on your Mac or URL on the web quickly and easily.  I highly recommended this application: I now wish there was a Launch Bar equivalent for Windows!

Remember the Milk (Web)

I admit I was very skeptical about a web based To-Do list application but I kept hearing people raving about Remember the Milk so I eventually decided to try it out myself.  Despite using GMail for almost a year I really was not expecting the responsive and feature-rich user interface this site provides.  There are so many little details that make this one of the most progressive To-Do list applications I have used in years e.g. entering dates is super simple: want tomorrow then enter ‘tomorrow’, want this Friday enter ‘friday’, want the 27 of February enter ‘feb 27′.   It puts grown up To-Do list applications like Microsoft Outlook to shame!

Twitter (Web)

Twitter can best be described as a micro blogging system where all blog entries (called tweets) are one hundred and forty characters or less in size.  Users can follow each other which is similar to subscribing to a blogs RSS feed.  This produces a constant stream of tweets which you can either view through your customised twitter home page or through a client like twhirl (below).  Twitter is very useful for exchanging micro updates over the course of the day with your friends and people you respect or find interesting, especially for details that you would not bother with a blog post about.  Although be careful who you follow or you may get more information about what they are currently doing than you would prefer.

Twhirl (Windows & Mac OS X)

Twhirl is a client application for twitter that runs on the adobe Air platform (essentially Flash for the desktop).  I had been using twitter via the default web user interface until last week when I switched to twhirl.  I had heard of twhirl before then but had been put off it as it used Adobe Air and I’ve been burned in the past by Adobe faulty auto update software before which had put me off free Adobe software.  Twhirl has been a very pleasant surprise in terms of quality and ease of use: I especially like the option to fade out the UI if it goes out of focus (e.g. you switch to another application).  It even has built in tools to shorten URLs, which is very useful due to twitters message length constraints.

Have you discovered any great software recently?

Mentoring Other Developers

Mentoring is something we do not see enough of in this industry especially compared to other industries e.g. tradesmen where new workers have to serve under a master tradesmen till they learn their craft.  I personally find one on one sessions very valuable to my personal growth but only if I am having a one on one with the best people available: why learn from anyone else other than a master?

The definition of Done is Badly Named

I’ve written about what done looks like before as it is something software engineers get wrong a lot: every witnessed an engineer claiming they are 99% done on a tasks for days?  This brief article points out that we should not consider done as a concrete definition but as a flexible concept that will change and grow over time: evolving as the scrum team does.

Advanced Segments and E-Commerce

This post on the official Google Analytics blog provides an good overview and introduction to the segmentation features that were recently added to the Analytics service.  It also demonstrates their capabilities to create custom segments to help analyse and understand your websites traffic patterns.

Google Webmaster Tools

This Google service that lets you register your domain and then view GoogleBot’s view of your site.  You can upload sitemaps too to help GoogleBot index all the pages on your site correctly.  You can also check out statistics for your domain like top search queries, crawl statistics and subscriber statistics too.  The service also diagnoses common problems detected by GoogleBot like broken links, HTTP errors, times outs and unreachable URLs.  Very useful for anyone running their own website.

Quick Security Checklist for Web Masters

Another post from a Google Blog this time from the Webmaster Central blog.  It is an old post but still useful as it provides a short checklist of basic security checks to preform for your website.

Open plan offices make workers sick

The results of this research is no real surprise, as putting lots of people is a room is a fairly efficient germ distribution mechanism.  Yet it is another useful bit of information in the great debate on open office work spaces versus individual/group offices for productivity and worker happiness.

Rands in Repose: A disclosure

I must admit to being a bit of a Rands fan: I read his blog and own a copy of his book (its even in my recommended reading list).  His latest post is about scaling as a manager to allow yourself to grow, he also talks about skills managers need and the transition from developer to manager.

Perforce: P4V

I’ve been a long time user of Perforce at work and I’ve always preferred the original P4Win client application to the newer P4V client.  But I’ve recently discovered that as of release 2008.2 that P4V now has the features that were in P4Win that I could not live without!  P4V has the added bonus of being less demanding on the Perforce server you are connecting to than P4Win.

Vancouver in the Fog

We had some seriousally thick fog in Vancouver over the last week, this amazing shot was taken from Cypress a nearby mountain.  This has serious desktop wallpaper potential!

Remember the Milk

In my continuing quest for a decent To-Do list application I have signed up for ‘Remember the Milk’ an online To-Do list service and so far it seems pretty decent a distinct improvement over Microsoft Outlook’s task management anyway but that is not particularly hard.  The fact this is an online service originally put me off, as I find some web applications clunky and slow but that worry proved unfounded.  It also has the added bonus of being available from any computer with a web browser and an internet connection, without any need to install anything.

Overnight Success: It Takes Years

Jeff Atwood (‘Coding Horror’) wrote an post I found very encouraging about how real success takes years and that the concept of an overnight success really is a bit of a myth.  It is encouraging to me as this blog is a very public project of mine and currently the readership is tiny but that is what I expect, slow growth in readers and if I stick at this then at some point in the future quicker growth.  I also think the concept of an overnight success is really a case of confusing when a project reaches a certain critical mass in terms of public awareness with the duration of a project’s development.  The results of the project suddenly becoming general knowledge produces a feeling that the project has come from no where (an unknown) to be a success overnight: this is very misleading as work has usually been going on for a long time before critical mass is achieved.

Crayon Physics Deluxe

This excellent little PC game merges stylised graphics,sophisticated physics, cunning problems and addictive game play to produce a puzzle game possibly as addictive as the original Bridge Builder game, which seemed to bring game development to a halt world wide upon release.  If you have a PC I’d highly recommend downloading the demo and giving this truely innovative puzzle game a try.

25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors

The MITRE Corporation released this weak a list it has compiled of the twenty five most dangerous programming errors, the report is well worth a read by all programmers who are interested in self improvement. If you find the length and depth of the report off putting then Jeff Atwood has written an excellent  summary of the report which you can find here.

LastFM

A friend tipped me off about this site which is an excellent music site, the feature I have been using most is their excellent (in browser) streaming music player: simply sign up for an account (its free), enter the name of a favorite band and press play.  Then the site will match your favorite band to other bands in its extensive database and play you a mix based on its results the more music you play and rate the better the matches become.

What interesting sites have you discovered this week?

• Ten Killer WordPress Hacks
  I was surprised to find that this article was interesting enough that I intend to experiment with implementing some of the suggestions.  This is unusual as I usually find lists of essential addons or plugins or hacks for WordPress uninspiring to say the least.
• Fruitful Time
  This is a personal productivity profiler, which also has a fairly rich feature set although unfortunately is PC only.   I especially like the fact it can show you the sites you spent the most time looking at as well as the programs and files.  I am both interested and a little scared of the potential findings of this tool, although I think curiosity is going to win out in the end!
• Drop Box
  Personal remote storage would seem to come of age with this service: its multi-platform, free, has slick syncing and recover features.  Rands also likes it, which is enough for me to try it out.  I intend to try this for syncing personal files between work and home and also between Vista and MacOS on my iMac at home.
• Learn Objective C
  I’m thinking about doing some Mac development, so learning objective C and Cocoa would seem to be required to achieve this.  This Objective C tutorial looks fairly decent: both in terms of content and presentation.
• World Of Warcraft – Patch notes 3.08
  I’ve started dabbling with World of Warcraft again and after two years I find my self rolling a druid again (I used to play one in the UK), mostly to PvP with mates.  New patch notes means it is time for more entertaining theorycrafting, on which classes are being buffed (improved) or nerfed (diminished).

What web pages have you found most interesting this week?

Anticipation takes many forms and covers many areas of software development:

• Anticipating Questions:
  • Have you described your software in terms the customer can understand?
  • Do they still want the software now they understand what you are proposing?
  • Have you been precise with your description?  Vague descriptions can lead to confusion and user disinterest or down right resistance to your software (if they think it is something it is not).
  • Do you have design documentation you can show the customer?
  • Is your design documentation actually understandable (by the user) and is it user focused e.g. work flows, user interfaces etc?  High quality, readable and concise design documents are an excellent way of allowing the customer to soak in the design in their own time.
• Anticipating deployment:
  • How is the user going to run your software?
  • Have you test run your software on the customer’s platform with a similar environment configuration before you attempt to roll it out?
  • What other dependencies will need to be installed to support your software?
  • How do you plan to push out those dependencies?
  • What sort of configuration management (CM) system is your customer using and can you harness it?
  • How will you install and configure your software?
• Anticipating integration:
  • How will your software integrate with the customers current work flow and application stack?
  • Does your software have dependencies are shared with other applications that could require those other applications to be upgraded too?  What extra cost would this introduce?
  • Does your application have specific operating system configuration requirements that could cause side effects for other application?
• Anticipating support:
  • How will you support your software post roll out?
  • How will diagnose problems on customers computers when you don’t have your development environment available?
  • Have you built any logging, metrics or error reporting tools built into your software?
  • Is there a help system integrated into the software and is that help system’s content usable and understandable by the target users?
  • How do you intend to upgrade your software or its dependencies in the future?
  • What sort of testing do you have in place to prevent upgrades breaking existing functionality?
• Anticipating retirement:
  • How easy would it be to remove your software from the customers application stack?
  • Do you have some sort of uninstallation script?
  • What about your applications dependencies: will any dependencies be orphaned and how will you remove them?
  • How tightly coupled is your software to the other systems it interacts with?  Can it be easily and gracefully decoupled?

You don’t need to answer all of the above questions but spending some time thinking about them and jotting down even single senence answer will help you anticipate potential problems.  It is never fun to have to tell a customer “I hadn’t thought about that.” after some show stopping problem emerges…