I often find myself viewing life through the lens of software development, a bit like when you play too much Tetris and all your friends turn into shapes. But recent events have made me think: maybe other things actually would be better if they were more like software development?
I needed to write some code. Thanks to George Brocklehurst, I was no longer content to do this on my personal laptop using gedit – I required Vim.
But I could not upgrade Vim!
Two weeks ago I was at the excellent /dev/fort. More on that another time; all I'll say now is that we were making a website in a fort.
I want to share this great idea about estimating that came from the excellent Mazz Mosley. Instead of worrying about estimating in hours or days, estimate in story points as follows:
After some time muddling through with Perl, I have accepted the inevitable – it's time to actually knuckle down and learn it properly. I have acquired some books, but I also require some direction – so I asked my excellent colleague and friend Mark Norman Francis to write a brief guest post for my blog.
I had a really inspiring chat with Matt Biddulph about D3 this week. He showed me some really cool things. I made some notes.
The last thing I wrote about was the CAP Theorem. Last week, Tom Hall visited our office and gave a very interesting talk, the central thesis of which was that the CAP Theorem, as often explained, is incorrect – or at least not very meaningful.
This week I learned some things about MongoDB. One of them was about how it fits in with the CAP theorem.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, and I think this diagram from my excellent new colleague Mat Wall while he was explaining it to me says everything: