Conscious Development

Behind every person is an inner story. A story that describes her world-view and thus her behaviour. The story may not be consciously written but silently adopted – and adapted – from local contemporary culture, childhood, genes and so on. All the books you read and stories you heard contributed to your story.

But there are sub-stories also. In physics we have had Newtonian and Einsteinian stories, and these stories constantly change. In this post I urge you to think what are your stories of software development. There are at least three different types of stories that define you as a software developer.
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Listening to Ivar Jacobson’s talk about closing the gap between business and IT gave me an idea, what software development methodologies are all about.

During the 50 years of software development we have seen a plethora of software development methods. Every ten years comes a new methodology, a new solution, to the same old problems we have been fighting for the whole 50 years. And will be fighting, dare I say, the next 50 years. One weapon used in the war is development methodologies. But what really is the essence of a methodology?

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Inspired by my colleaque’s post about best books on web development, I decided to share my list of books about software development on general. I found a good web site for sharing books and reviews, GoodReads. I’ve shared the most interesting books from past few years. Books vary from programming to designing, from project management to team leading, from methodologies to practises. As I believe, that over-specialization kills productivity, I like to have a broad understanding to the craft.

Here’s my list: http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/2854969?sort=rating.

Now that Visual Studio 2010 beta 2 is out, some new information about the packaging of the product is also revealed. Gone is the old jumble of nearly dozen different flavors. Now everything comes in three different products: Visual Studio Professional, Visual Studio Premium and Visual Studio Ultimate. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some highlights from the first day in Scan-Agile conference.

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AKVA club of HETKY organized a seminar about agile, scrum and testing. It was a two-day cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm and back and there were many speakers from different backgrounds. There was a common (though unplanned) theme – doing agile is not easy. Read the rest of this entry »

A while ago I attended an evening organized by Tietotoviikko. They had a few presentations and an ending panel discussion having members from both client and supplier side and also a researcher.
The topics of discussion were IT-suppliers ability to keep their promises, customers’ expectations towards their suppliers and what makes real partnership.
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Today’s software development is more challenging than ever. Yes, in some part it’s a lot easier with higher generation tools compared to assembly languages, but I claim that requirements have raised even faster than the abstraction level in tooling. Read the rest of this entry »

I previously had three different WordPress installations, and it got a maintenance headache (although upgrades are relatively easy on current WP) and I din’t like fact that I had three different accounts, had to install plugins thrice etc.
Luckily, there’s an edition of WP that allows me to have multiple blog instances on one installation, namely WordPress µ. I already had a MU up and running (in /mu/-directory), so let’s go importing the pages, posts and comments from old WP’s. And it was… well…almost easy. Read the rest of this entry »

My old WP got hacked, and this post got deleted. Basically, all I said can be founf from Jouni’s post.