Weekend Reader, Week 33

Tudor Girba on .NET Rocks

.NET Rocks is still one of my favorite podcast. In this episode my colleague Tudor talks about his ideas of modern software development, especially about reading code an source code analysis.
A very interesting conversation, Tudor is eloquent as always. But Richard also cuts to the chase at the end: “This all sounds very academic” … listen to the conversation and judge for yourself.

No Estimates: A critique by Steve McConnell

The NoEstimates movement is a new trend in Agile that critizises many Agile methodologies that set heavy focus on planning and therefore spend a lot of effort for estimating.
The proponents of the NoEstimate movement argue that Software Development essentially is nothing like building housese but rather like building a science theory (do you think Einstein estimated how long it would take him to figure out relativity theory?).
As a conclusion software estimation is mostly a farce according to NoEstimates:

It seems that the NoEstimates movement now gained momentum, as the famous author Steve McConnell deems to reply with a video:

No Estimates: The Reply of Ron Jeffries

Ron Jeffries, one of the main proponents of NoEstimates, has an elaborate reply to Steve McDonnell where he shows flaws in the arguments of McDonnell and defends the ideas behind NoEstimates.

NoEstimates: More Resources

• Estimation is Evil: Overcoming the Estimation Obsession by Ron Jeffries
• Why are software development estimates regularly off by a factor of 2-3 times? - a very nice analogy with planning a hike …
• Software engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone? by Tom DeMarco
• Two Reasons Why Estimates Aren’t Worth It
• My Customers Need Estimates, What Do I do?
• My First, Last & Only Blog Post About #NoEstimates

The only way out of the estimating nightmare is to call “bullshit” on it, and publicly accept - indeed, embrace - the uncertainty that’s inherent in what we’re doing.

JavaScript: Universal JavaScript at Netflix

Netflix introduced JavaScript on the server to reuse the same logic on the server and the client.

Context switching between languages was not ideal.

After PayPal announced switching all their Java code to JavaScript, this is another big company investing heavily on JavaScript on the server.

JavaScript: Building a desktop application with Electron

A very detailed tutorial on how to build a desktop application with JavaScript and web technologies.
After the browser and the server, JavaScript sets out to conquer the desktop …

JavaScript: Using Server Side Javascript with Wildfly

JBoss, the traditional Java server, jumps the bandwaggon and introduces support for server-side JavaScript. Interesting … probably the first sensible usage of Nashorn I have seen so far (after Project Avatar was killed by Oracle)

But what I find even more interesting, is the new hot deployment mechanism that allows you to map the web content root to your local workspace. This migth be a huge productivity boost for Java web development … so I might have to revise my tweet:

Trying to do modern web development with the traditional Java approach (WAR, Maven) seems to be the ultimate productivity killer …

— Jonas Bandi (@jbandi) April 4, 2015

Oldie but Goodie: Gavin King about ORM

It turns out that ORM is a difficult problem, in subtle ways. It always looks simpler from the outside than it turns out to be once you start getting your hands dirty.

People try to apply ORM where it is not really suitable.

Tweets of the week:

A 5 megabyte IBM hard disk is loaded into an airplane. It weighed over 1000kg, 1956. pic.twitter.com/zdOdL5cf4W

— History In Pictures (@HistoryInPics) August 15, 2015

@michelesliger @jeffpatton by that analogy, communicating via an issue tracker is like watching porn and "helping" oneself.

— Aslak Hellesøy (@aslak_hellesoy) August 4, 2015