Read this: How Ma Bell Shelved the Future for 60 Years.

AT&T firmly believed that the answering machine, and its magnetic tapes, would lead the public to abandon the telephone.

How many good ideas are set aside by managers who simply don't have a clue what users actually want …

Read this: "How to explain why multi-threading is difficult".

We need to talk. This is not that difficult.

Multi-threading is only difficult if you do it badly. There are an almost infinite number of ways to do it badly. Many magazines and bloggers have decided that the multithreading hurdle is …

The "default" template I chose was too narrow for presenting code samples. Changed it.

Here's a pretty simple set of use cases for a code-kata database application.

This is largely transactional, not analytical.

It's a simple inventory of ingredients, recipes and locations.

Tonight (May 25th). Red Dog. Colley Ave. Ghent. I'll be wearing my Stack Overflow shirt. I'll be there about 7. I know that at least one other person won't be there until 8.

The Meetup link.

I like this meetup idea a lot. Probably because the WFH life-style is a …

I've seen some discussion on Stack Overflow that is best characterized by the question: "What is Strictly Agile?", or "What's the Official Agile Approach?".

Someone shared this with me recently: "Process kills developer passion".

I have also heard some great complaints about organizations that claim "Agile" and actually do nothing …

I'm a big fan of plain-text tools. Source Code. ReStructuredText. LaTeX.

I'm not a big fan of proprietary file formats and document formats that are difficult or impossible to decode. JSON and XML rock. .XLS files are painful and difficult to work with.

UML Diagrams are a particularly odious problem …

http://www.meetup.com/757-Python-Users-Group/

I'm looking forward to meeting other Python developers in Hampton Roads.

Tonight. 7:00 PM. See you there.

A single poorly-made decision can have profound ripple-effects. Once your stuck with it, you make accommodations, hacks and work-arounds. Eventually, things work, but the result is less than ideal.

Changing tack requires sometimes pervasive rework to the application. How can we reduce the risks and improve the value created?

First, the definition. A use case describes an actor's interaction with a system to create business value. There are three parts: Actor, Interaction and Business Value.

1. Not Interactive.

1.1. The use case is just features and technical attributes with no actor interaction expressed.

1.2. The use case is …