Whilst discussing problem software projects with a colleague, once again an excerpt from
Agile Software Development came into my mind. In the chapter about software development methodologies
Cockburn points out the example of Kent Arett, who whilst at
Fingerhut experienced a depressed 80 strong IS department that was unable to develop new software because of the support demands of the older software. Rather than take the route that many IT managers would, that of increasing the number of staff, he actually cut staffing levels by 25%. The better people were kept and their salaries increased. The resulting improvement in morale and subsequently output meant that only 15 staff did support and the rest could get on with enabling the business by developing software. A lesson to learn?
Last night I attended the Thoughtworks Geek Night at Thoughtworks rather impressively XP friendly London offices. Adewale Oshineye gave a great introduction to the ideas of and played devils advocate for the REST architectural style. REST was proposed by Roy Fielding in his PhD dissertation and is an acronym for Representational State Transfer. Whilst I remained unconvinced of the wider applicability of REST, it was good to see such a simple and elegant mechanism for perhaps exploring a domain of objects online and perhaps will become more popular as it is certainly an application of the simplest that could possibly work principle.
Towards the end of the evening the conversation turned to favourite languages with a particular leaning towards those that gave productivity gains. Of course, C# was high up on my list and that of a few of the others; Ade favoured Java purely because of the excellent IntelliJ IDEA (and who could blame him). Perl was not as popular as some might have thought and a quick look at a periodic table of "well over a hundred operators" for the current design of Perl 6 showed why. Ade also introduced me to a language that I had never seen before but I will certainly try using, it is called IO and takes its inspiration from smalltalk. All in all an enjoyable evening.