The passing of pioneers - SD Times: Software Development News.

SD Times has published some brief memories of some of those the industry lost this year.

This is a follow-up to my Friday rant Forbes is wrong about "Developernomics"

First: If the subject's of interest to you, you might enjoy (or despise) the column on the subject I've been writing for SD Times for the past decade. (I can't help but wonder if I wrote in …

Forbes is wrong when it says:

The thing is, software talent is extraordinarily nonlinear...It’s still a kind of black magic...the 10x phenomenon, and the industry’s reliance on it, doesn’t seem to get engineered or managed away. Because the 10xers keep inventing new tools for themselves …

A team, unaccustomed to but enthusiastic about moving towards agile methodologies, begins an important project. The project has many facets and a number of strong developers, so it seems natural for the developers to concentrate on a single aspect: Adam is associated with the Widget feature, Barbara focuses on the …

Not counting Geek Acres, the best 100% Kona coffees were available for tasting during the annual Coffee Stroll.

Tina and I both agreed on the top 3:

1. Mr. Bean: Complex, bright, great mouthfeel, clean finish -- everything you could want in a coffee.
2. Sugai: Super mellow and round with a clean …

One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

RIP John McCarthy. Truly one of the greats in our field.

This is Dart:

[sourcecode lang="JavaScript"]
main() {
try{
var x = 'foo';
int s = x;
print('Shirley, you are joking');
}catch(var e){
print('Surely this will be executed.');
}
}
[/sourcecode]

Note that I've declared s to be of type int and, just to make sure the point is clear, have assigned …

I should hope so.

This was the afternoon’s first major talk. David Ungar from IBM Research first demonstrated that the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet comes from a race condition (if only he had waited for news from the Friar).

That was excellent, but the real premise of his talk …