Swine Flu and the media effect

For weeks and weeks there was massive coverage of the Swine Flu pandemic in the British media. The story of a young, completely healthy school-girl who died from the flu got a lot of newspaper column space. It scared a lot of people. She was the first person to die who had no underlying illness. Turns out she didn’t die from swine flu at all, but from a completely unrelated problem. Then we had experts claiming that up to 65,000 people could die. It was front-page news for weeks. Last week there was apparently 100,000 new flu cases in one day.

And then the media got bored of the story. There was the Michael Jackson story to cover and the Jordan/Andre split too.

And now, the number of swine flu cases being diagnosed has dropped off massively.

Is this a case of the media reporting the situation or causing it?

Introduction to Functional Programming

Manning have an upcoming book called “Functional Programming In The Real World” – it’s written by Tomas Petricek with Stack Overflow legend Jon Skeet.

The first chapter is free on the Manning site and is an excellent overview of Functional programming. It includes great examples of functional ideals alongside the more common imperative style.

The Manning page for the book is: http://www.manning.com/petricek/

The first chapter is here: http://www.manning.com/petricek/petricek_meapch1.pdf

The Smashing Book available for pre-order with 20% off

Although The Smashing Book from www.smashingmagazine.com won’t be published until late September, you can secure your copy today. Now, why would you do that? For one reason, you will get the huge discount: 20% off the regular price. If you pre-order now, you’ll pay just $23.90 USD. And, of course you will be among the first to get The Smashing Book fresh off the press.

What Will You Get?

The book has 300 pages in all, full of practical and useful knowledge for designers and Web developers. It contains 10 chapters and is printed in full color. The book is a paperback and is 8.27 × 5.5 inches (21 × 14 cm).

The book is available exclusively from Smashing Magazine and nowhere else. This first and only Smashing Book looks at Web design rules of thumb, color theory, usability guidelines, user interface design, best coding and optimization practices, as well as typography, marketing, branding and exclusive insights from top designers across the globe.

It was written by Jacob Gube (SixRevisions), Dmitry Fadeev (UsabilityPost), Chris Spooner (Spoongraphics), Darius A Monsef IV (COLOURlovers.com), Alessandro Cattaneo (with co-editing by Jon Tan), Steven Snell (VandelayDesign), David Leggett (UXBooth), Andrew Maier (UXBooth), Kayla Knight (regular writer on SM), René Schmidt (system administrator of our servers) and the Smashing Magazine editorial team, Vitaly Friedman and Sven Lennartz.

Two great sites for free icons and vectors

Two great sites that are stuffed full of awesome free icons and vector images:

http://www.vectorstock.com/

http://www.freeiconsdownload.com/index.html

World’s coolest Hello World

eval(gzinflate(base64_decode('
4+Wyt+PlsrEvyCjg5UrOSSwuVgjPL8
pJUajm5eIsKE3KyUxWSCvNSy7JzM9T
8EjNyclX0NAES3KmJmfkK8THu4X6OY
d4+vvFx1vDRZMzijSMjTStkZQ5+zgG
B0PU1PJyAZFKhYKtQl5qOcQ+a5CArh
3YBg2QRiRnAQA=')));

Translates as:

class World {
    public function Hello () {
        echo __FUNCTION__;
        echo chr(32);
        echo __CLASS__;
    }
}
$x = new World;
$x->Hello();

This was one of the WIN submissions for this job. All the WIN/FAIL entries are here.

Does Agile development mean cutting corners?

We have a Java Server Faces project on the go at the moment. We did a POC the other week that kinda works. We’ve since been on a course and armed with our new knowledge it is obvious that the POC is using a poor design and that is causing it to not work correctly.

So today I argued strongly for throwing the POC away, starting again and doing it properly. This just seems to me to be the right thing to do – use recognised design patterns and make an abstracted and extensible piece of software.

But the POC almost works.

And we’re using Agile and so we’re meant to be delivering early and often. Binning the POC will probably mean that stories that were meant for this iteration won’t make it. Not doing the POC means we deliver something I’m not happy with.

But I’m gonna bite the bullet on this one, fix the POC and not redo it. Getting the stories into the iteration beats my developer instinct to do it right.

Matt Cutts is doing ’something’ for 30 days

Matt Cutts has been trying something new or giving something up for 30 days at a time. First he tried to do 10k steps every day, then he gave up TV and now he’s biking to work at the Googleplex – each one for the 30 days.

As he says, 30 days is long enough to build a habit. I’m trying out his idea and I’m not eating chocolate for the whole of July.

Thinking beyond the relationals

Relational databases, such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and various commercial products, have served us well for many years. Lately, however, there has been a lot of discussion on whether the relational model is reaching the end of its life-span, and what may come after it.

Should you care? Which database technology should you be using?

http://thinkvitamin.com/dev/should-you-go-beyond-relational-databases/

Continuous design in Agile development

Ron Jeffries of XP fame:

“If I’ve got six months to build a system, then I’ll spend six months building it. I’ll also spend six months designing it, and another six months testing it. The good news is that it’s the same six months”.

Seems like the best (and obvious) thing, right? Build the design based on your knowledge, which you acquire as you work on the project and encounter problems and design choices.

But begs the question: Is there a place for an Architect in an Agile environment and is there any value in an architecture document?

An architecture document is a system design that answers key design problems and breaks the system down into manageable and extensible components. I’ve worked on big arch documents in the past when working in waterfall environments – looking back, it’s easy to see that we spent a lot of time agonizing over design decisions that couldn’t be properly answered until much of the code was written. So continuous design is good.

But how do you document it in a continuous fashion? We used to create Word documents but that seems like too much work if you are going to be changing it often as you will be re-arranging the document all the time. A Wiki? Some bespoke Agile tool? UML tool?

Or do you not document it at all? Is Javadoc (or your language’s equivalent) enough along with some auto-generated class diagrams? Perhaps the test cases will document the functions of the system and avoid the need for Sequence diagrams? After all, once the code is done, the tests pass and the system is released, what’s the architecture design document for? It can only be a reference tool for people coming onto the project later on.

Many people have said that an Agile design document should have “Just enough in it to get the job done”. Great in theory but a tough one to do – what’s just enough?

You might find some actual text amongst those brackets