I loved Sara Ford’s thoughts about coding katas. Yes, most coding should really be referred to as coding kihon (as you practice daily), and coding kumite when you’re deep in a project. Nice one. I also enjoyed Steve Andrew’s post on Shotokan Development that Sara linked to.
Oh, and good luck in your new role Sara.
You’ve probably heard of Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational by now. It seems to be garnering a cult like following of late, and will likely be one of those books that everyone has an opinion on (along with The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Purple Cow, and of course Twilight :-)) Aaron Wall put me on to the book a few weeks ago and I have to agree it’s well worth reading. The book...
I had to shake my head when I read this Accenture survey on the demands of the Millennial Generation. The usual ‘demands’ of wanting to choose their technology, insisting on state-of-the-art technology, not wanting to seek corporate approval, requiring new communication channels, etc all came up. It seemed odd that a survey like this would appear after all the economic changes of late. Turns...
Malcolm Gladwell is a great story-teller, no doubt about it. I loved his latest book Outliers. And whilst I agree with Joel Spolksy that the book is little more than cleverly strung together anecdotes, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. For example, Gladwell’s chapter on the necessity of hard work (you must do your 10,000 hours) to achieve success is a good motivator. Yes, it might be...
Adobe has been experimenting with it’s own image navigation & stitching together technology, and Infinite Images is the latest demonstration of it (see here for the ReadWriteWeb article). You, me and every other Microsoft watcher will immediately see shades of Deep Zoom and perhaps a little Photosynth in this. What’s cool about the the Adobe system is how it uses tagging (based on...
Amazon’s CTO – Werner Vogels – has been awarded the Information Week Chief of the Year title. He’s quickly given the credit to his team of course, legend that he is. Now, it’s easy to be cynical of awards – it seems that sometimes companies/twitter abusers/magazines/etc just create them as a marketing device – but regardless, it’d be hard to disagree with the decision in this case...
Should we be surprised by this Gartner report outlining the second year on year decline in PC chip sales (they’re predicting a 16.3% decline). Intel and AMD must be doing it hard, like, ahem, just about everyone in the IT industry. Well, not quite. At least games are doing well, with sales of game hardware and software in the US up by 10% over last year’s figures (that’s a nice little $3B...
OMG, panic! But don’t be distracted by that other zero day exploit (you know, the Internet Explorer one), here’s where your security gaze should be firmly focused: WordPad. It turns out that WordPad has a significant exploit. And by significant, I mean it affects at least one person. I strongly recommend WordPad users (both of you) stay glued to your browser screens (here) in anticipation of...
I’ve been using Chrome a fair bit lately. Why? It’s fast. And although people point to its lack of basic features, plug-in architecture (although that is in the works), cross platform support and it’s lack of market share, I for one don’t care, as long as it is fast for browsing. I use Firefox when I need the other stuff. Anyway, Chrome came out of Beta yesterday. Download it here. Love...