Centuries ago -- it seems -- Jim Coplien facilitated a session for us at ChiliPLoP . Eventually, I figured out that patterns are a solution to a problem in a context which resolves various alternative forces, and has some understood consequences. Context - Problem - Forces - Solution - Consequences.

In this month's CACM, the article on …

See So What Are Requirements? in Dr. Dobb's.

I've seen requirements done badly. I've seen some notable failures of the use case technique: almost entirely because people refuse to actually apply the technique; they refuse to write use cases from the actor's point of view. I've whined about this before …

The Alex Handy story Study Predicts Upswing in Dynamic Language Use is old news, but when it's in a print publication like SD Times, then it starts to gain some traction. And it's one of those journalistic things: you can't repeat the obvious without some kind of "angle". And the …

The problem with Python is the vastness of the Open Source community. You may think you have something cool for HTML parsing , but then someone tells you about Beautiful Soup which already does it.

In my defense, I actually did a version of this HTML parsing back in '02. Indeed …

The mixed content model, defined succinctly in the XML standards, is pleasant enough for human communication, but leaves a lot to be desired. For example, mapping a mixed content model to a relational database is a hard problem.

The problem is made worse when the document is HTML. HTML doesn't …

We wind up in this situation from time to time.

Customer:

[X] is broken, what will it cost to fix it?

Us:

Depends, but put $$$ in your budget.

Customer:

I can't afford $$$, I can barely afford to Keep The Lights On™!

At this point, the conversation is usually over. There …

In Object Modeling , I repeated a procedure for object identification that comes from the classic Object-Oriented Modeling and Design (Rumbaugh, et. al.)

Objects are characterized by their state change. Therefore, to distinguish among classes of objects, we need to determine if two objects have the same states and state transitions …

When you start fresh (as I sometimes do), you create a Django project into which you create your first application. You use django-admin.py to spin up a project directory, and from in side there, use manage.py to create an application boilerplate.

The Django folks are very clear on …

I think that learning Java is challenging. You've got to learn the language, object-oriented programming, the libraries and the endless Java Technologies. The Java landscape is crowded with J*tx* and tx J add-ons, where tx is some technology abbreviation; for example, JAXWS, JAXB, SAAJ, JMS, JFC, JCE, JAAS, etc …

Today's entry in Scott Berkun's blog (Asshole driven development ) is brilliantly scathing. The comments are also handy for identifying the key dysfunctionality in an organization.

A couple of years ago Mark Grand shared with me a number of things that seem to make software development needlessly clumsy and complex. Indeed …