girton’s devnotes

Last night I listened to Kent Beck's talk on a dozen trends. The talk was about an hour and the link is carried below.
 
KB is always interesting.
 
The trends, in order of discussion, by trend category:
 
MORE information sharing (less privacy and not feeling too bad about it), more information collecting (this call may be monitored), and more frequent software releases -- maybe between each keystroke (?!), would be the logical endpoint of the trend.
 
LESS complex data -- relational databases having hit a high water mark and now being supplanted by "stupidification" of data -- use of large files, terabytes of key-value pairs processed Hadoop/MapReduce in clusters. And SCREENLESS computing (ipod shuffle.) Kent doesn't specifically talk about wearable, but that's where the less-display computing trend is going. You could have a phone without a screen, right? What would that look like!
 
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: Computers sucking up 10 percent of the world's supply of electricity. Loss of privacy.
 
GONE are both "free" and ad-supported software. They will disappear, along with other deferred revenue business models. Free only works if you have something to sell. What's left: paying for things you find valuable. Could work!
Also disappearing: talk about software re-use. If your speed of development approaches a very fast rate, you no longer care about re-use. Gone: high status for programming. Everyone knows what it is now. KB charges less than he did 15 years ago.
 
NEW trends -- DESIGN will become a more and more important skill, making clear layers, separation of concerns. In KB's responsive design project he learned that design is LEARNABLE.
The use of automated tests. How many tests do you run a day? The number is going up. With faster and faster release times, you just can't wait for someone else to catch your mistakes. Ten years from now -- run all the tests in between every keystroke? JUNIT MAX -- make test running time more productive.
 
WHY? The big question at the end of thinking about all the trends is WHY? What do I want to accomplish for the remaining years I have programming? If you focus on money alone, you end up causing problems you never thought about.
 
...
So that's the talk summary. Here's the meme-a-the-week, pass it on: Stylish, Thoughtful, Informative, Powerful and don't-do-this Radical.
 
Stylish -- A romantic getaway near Rutland Vermont
http://www.whiterocksinn.com/explore.html
 
Thoughtful -- Kent Beck on 12 trends
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/just-you-wait
 
Informative -- Robert Cadena's links of the week
http://applied-ux.com/blog/
 
Powerful -- It works for Google...
http://wiki.apache.org/hadoop/HadoopMapReduce
 
Radical (how to try things at home that you shouldn't)
http://goodexperience.com/2009/06/flamethrowers-availab.php

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The iPhone 3.0 SDK installed with only a slight hitch -- had o delete my entire developer folder to make room.
 
The 3.0 iPhone software went in surprisingly effortlessly after download yesterday. Cut copy paste works intuitively with a double tap, little menu entries come up in your text. A voice recorder app was added, pushing all the other apps down to other screens.
 
All good.

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Three_photos_of_a_tree_in_the_.zip (1060 KB)

Here are three photos of a tree in the woods, next to a stream.

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Often the San Fernando Valley is hot and dry. Not today.

   

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Views_from_the_balcony_North_t.zip (251 KB)

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The current Java study group book is "Effective Java" (2nd edition) by Java luminary Joshua Bloch. Reviews of this book advise that you stop writing Java code until you have read the book, or alternately, that you read the book before even beginning to write Java code. I have chosen the second of these two options, although I have installed build 1.6.0_13 of the Java SE runtime environment as part of another project. Project Snore.
 
Seriously, though, Bloch's book is worth memorizing, not only because of its many pithy apothegms. It is worth memorizing because the chapters form an interconnected semantic network!
 
Actually, if you were familiar with Java 5, it's a great look what a broad range of changes have made into Java 6.
 
Starting in June, we will go through the 78 items and assign each item an Italian noun as a mnemonic. By August or perhaps September, depending upon our travel commitments, we will have it. Until then, "Settantotto," or, at the very least, "Settanta!"
 
The first item, "Consider static factory methods instead of constructor"

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Keep twitter track of these two talkin' trams, at the recently relinquished "angelsflight" twitter account, courtesy of Marissa L. Aguinaldo. And therein, no doubt, resides many a tramway tale. Well, one tale, anyway.
 
http://twitter.com/angelsflight

Angels Flight, shortest railway in the world, Circa 2007.

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