Auswanderer Quatsch

Describing what we do (in software development) with sport terms would sound like this:

• The whole team is playing on the field, the coach, the team, the replacements, the cheerleaders, the bus driver and the cook… in other words, the bench is plain empty!
• Games last 8 hours a day (at best), 5 days a week (most of the time), 52 weeks a year (minus the legal breaks)
• We only play, we never train
• We rarely have a common goal and scoring points has never been so fuzzy
• The rules of the game are strictly confidential

What if we changed the rules of the game?

• What if we defined some “training time” to perform “code katas”?
• What if we defined some “play time” when we really do what we do best?
• What if we did not select the whole team for each game but a stable subset?
• What if the members of the bench were ready to help the ones playing but not playing themselves…?
• What if we shared the rules we fix for ourselves?
• What if we could draft team members from/to other teams to enrich our/their game?

What if what if what if…?

I could not resist :]

Why is agile software development like teenage sex?

• It’s on everyone’s mind all the time.
• Everyone is talking about it all the time.
• Everyone thinks everyone else is doing it.
• Almost no one is really doing it.

 

The few who are doing it are:

• doing it poorly
• hopeful it will be better next time
• not practicing it safely

(Source)

Simple design, limited functionalities, very easy to use, small price…

As Lam said on twitter  “Noteslate : If not vaporware, major WANT”

What if visual studio had achievements? How goofy would that be? Can you imagine the teaching potential of such a tool? Here are some of the best achievements the orginal author of the article imagined… and some more are to find in the comments:

• The Mathematician – Defined 15 local variables with a single character name
• Spaghetti Monster – Written a single line with more than 300 characters
• The Organizer – Created a Solution with more than 50 projects
• The Portal – Created a circular project dependency
• The Multitasker – Have more than 50 source files open at the same time
• Pasta Chef – Created a class with more than 100 fields, properties or methods
• Procedural Programmer – Created a method with more than 10 out parameters
• The Poet – Written a source file with more than 10,000 lines
• The Enterprise – Build Solution took more than 10 minutes
• The Architect – Created 25 Interfaces in a single project
• The Right Way – Test method is longer than the tested method
• Pokemon Programming – Caught all the exceptions
• The Cloner – Copy-pasted more than 50 lines
• Every Option Considered – Created an enum with more than 30 values

… and that’s when I start browsing the VisualStudio Extension API…

Following my review of Rework, here is a small video of Jason Fried – one of the authors – at TED. Just gasp in the comments if it sounds familiar…