Weekend Reader, Week 6: Bricks

Software is not made of bricks

Once you understand that software is not a simple pile of bricks, you understand that the minimum level of competence required to contribute positively to a project is non-trivial.

I think this essay should be a “must read” for anyone involved into software development. It shows the problems with the widespread mentality that developing a piece of software is like building something fairly simple out of bricks.
One point which shows the fundamental difference between laying bricks and software development particularly stuck with me: Skilled developers typically come up with solutions that are simpler and consist of less code than less skilled developers. This does not fit a “brick mentality”, where you have a fixed amount of bricks to move.

ChakraCore is now Open-Source

The JavaScript engine by Microsoft is now available under the MIT License at the ChakraCore GitHub repository.

There is already a pull request to make Node.js run on ChakraCore. And there is a new node-chakracore repo under the Node.js Foundation. Unfortunately it seems that it is only working on windows for now …

Project Raider

JetBrains is building a cross-platform C# IDE … the missing piece in true cross-platform .NET development.

Angular 2 versus React: There Will Be Blood

Of course the title is link-bait and the article is provocative. But it is still a good comparison between the different approaches and concepts used in Angular2 and React.

Video: Be Predictable, Not Correct

The talk gives a good overview to different approaches for data-binding in current web-frameworks. It also explains the concept and benefits of using a virtual dom.

Piracy in online education

There was a lot of money to be made if you got into online education early: Scott Allen earned over one million dollars in 2013 from his Pluralsight courses!

Today the landscape looks not that promising any more… especially Udemy seems to attract/enable piracy and price-dumping:

• How Udemy Is Profiting From Piracy
• Less than 24 hours on Udemy as an instructor and I’m close to leaving

The Sad State of Web Development

The web (specifically the Javascript/Node community) has created some of the most complicated, convoluted, over engineered tools ever conceived.

A very critical view on the current trends in web development. The author seems pretty frustrated … but he has some points.

Shields Down

Happy people don’t leave jobs they love

An accurate analysis how people get to the point where they quit their job. I have gone through that process many times in my career …

Coders Without Clothes

Without comment …

Funny: This is what happens when you reply to spam email

If you like it, here are more scam baiting stories: 419 Eater

Tweets of the week:

Optional Type System pic.twitter.com/R5ZS5Xx9Jm

— Mario Fusco (@mariofusco) February 7, 2016

2 unit tests. 0 integration tests pic.twitter.com/V2Z9F4G1sJ

— Practical Developer (@ThePracticalDev) January 14, 2016

A guide to software development job advertisements (via @antichason) pic.twitter.com/Kvr6NxmGqX

— Annie Lin (@annielin) January 21, 2016

Trainings and Courses Update

The first month in 2016 was very busy in regard to my trainings. I updated my courses to reflect the latest trends in web development:

I held a 3 day course at SBB for JavaScript and AngularJS. I updated this course to contain a module about the ES6/ES2015 language and corresponding tooling with Webpack and Babel.

I also updated my course module in the CAS “Mobile Application Development” at the University of Applied Sciences. Besides HTML5 as a platform for mobile development I am also teaching an intro to Ionic and React Native. These frameworks show two different approaches for mobile development that are using current web technologies.

In February & March I will run two 3-day in-house courses about JavaScript and Angular development at ELCA.

In April I will run a 4-day in-house course at Puzzle. In this course I will compare Angular and React/Flux and it will also contain an intro to Angular 2.

Please contact me, if you are intersted in a course about those latest trends in web technologies.

I will also continue to offer public courses in 2016:

At DigiComp my next course “Frontend-Entwicklung mit AngularJS” is scheduled for April.

At BBV Academy my next course “Frontend-Entwicklung mit JavaScript & AngularJS” is scheduled for May.

Weekend Reader, New Year's Edition

Microsoft’s modern JavaScript Engine is going Open-Source

Chakra, the JavaScript Engine that powers Microsoft Edge is going open-source!
This is very interesting, since Chakra is currently the fastest JavaScript engine and the engine with the widest ES6 compatibility.
Microsoft already showed that Node.js can run on top of Chakra. I am curious if this will be a scenario picked up by the open-source community …

However right now, the step to open-source has not yet happened. According to the announcement it will happen “after the holidays”.

Visual Studio Code is Open-Source

Open-source, once scolded as “cancer”, is becoming the new black at Microsoft. The sources of Visual Studio Code are available on Github.
Also Visual Studio Code now supports extensions.

Exploring the new .NET “dotnet” Command Line Interface (CLI)

Apart from the fact that .NET Core and ASP.NET 5 will be cross-platform, Microsoft is also working on a simple cross-platform CLI for .NET… It very much looks like Node/NPM!
I am really looking forward when .NET development becomes as accessible as Node development is today. With the possibilities to develop .NET on Mac/Linux and to run .NET application on Linux servers. Combine the elegance of C# and the dynamic compilation of ASP.NET with the simplicity of this CLI and you get a package that looks really productive for all kinds of enterprise applications … hard times for Java :-)

Free eBook: Modern Java EE Design Patterns

Hmm… I did not read the whole book, but I rather skimmed it. In my opinion this book is not about Java EE. It is about microservices, and it claims that microservices are the “modern” way for developing enterprise applications. It shows some interesting patterns for implementing applications with microservices.
But it also shows that Java EE does not offer much for microservices and in appendix A it lists a set of technologies that are (in my opinion) better suited for implementing micorservices.

Free eBook: Professor Frisby’s Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming

A very readable introduction to the concepts of functional programming in JavaScript. Currying, functional composition, functors … learn all those constructs and many more.

Apps: The iPad Pro has an App Store problem

Apps on iOS sell for unsustainably low prices

I really like my iPad Pro. For most scenarios it replaced my iPad Air (execpt reading in bed). However the app landscape of optimized apps for the iPad Pro really is disappointing. This article has an explanation why.

Funny: Bret Victor - The Future of Programming

A really interesting presentation from 1973 … or is it? Funny in a geeky way but also very insightfull.

Tweets of the Week

When you try to make a small change to tightly-coupled software pic.twitter.com/Izs0LNYmOu

— Practical Developer (@ThePracticalDev) December 29, 2015

The psychodynamics of coding interviews in one picture. pic.twitter.com/6XarcYAq2D

— Jonathan Eyler-Werve (@EylerWerve) December 16, 2015

I saw someone with their job title as just “Developer”. Not “engineer”, not “architect”, just…”developer”. What a psycho.

— I Am Devloper (@iamdevloper) November 24, 2015

Love this from @adrianco's #yow15 talk - are you in a job where your leadership doesn't think you're a superstar? pic.twitter.com/IEX97h3UAx

— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 6, 2015

Weekend Reader, Christmas Edition

Angular 2 is officially beta

We’re now confident that most developers can be successful building large applications using Angular 2.

The developer guides are already amazingly polished. If you have not yet started to look into this new framework, now is a good time.

We have closed the hype-cycle

The post is a good high-level overview comparing the basic concepts of React and Angular 2.

At the beginning of the year we have seen posts that were explaining React to developers that know Angular. Now we have posts that explain Angular 2 to developers that know React…

Angular 2 for Desktop Apps

Angular 2 promises to be a framework not only for web development but also for mobile development. This article show how the reach can even be extended to the Desktop by using Electron.

Jazoon in Bern: The future of Web Development

On April 4th there will take place the Jazoon TechDays on the beautiful Gurten. Traditionally Jazoon was a multi-track Java conference. For the next year however the organizers came up with a new concept of a one-day conference that focuses on a single topic. The topic for the upcoming conference in Bern is “The Future of Web Development” and they already have an interesting line-up of speakers (and I heard the rumor that there will even be more international speakers announced soon …).
I suggest you should get your ticket for that event soon, even if you are not living in Bern. I was lucky and could convince my employer to sponser my ticket :-)

Redux Screencast

Dan Abramov, the creator of Redux, created an amazing series of screencasts for Egghead. It is one of the most instructive screencasts I have watched the whole year. And it is available for free!
If you want to learn about Redux and how it approaches the ideas of Flux you should definitely watch these short lessons.
But even if Redux/Flux is not a topic that interests you, the screencasts teach a lot about using ES6 and test-driven development in JavaScript.

The future of JavaScript is (almost) now

Every once in a while, a piece of technology is situated in the right place at the right time, and it ends up taking over the world. […] ES6 is new foundation for what may be the most important programming language of the next several decades.

The article is good overview over the JavaScript ecosystem today and its relevance in the future.

The End of Dynamic Languages

Working in dynamic languages is fine if you’re just adding a feature on top of the pile of features. But anything else is impossibly difficult.

Not everybody agrees with the future relevance of JavaScript. According to the article the time for dynamic languages is over and it is time to move on.

Tweets of the Week

"Too old for microservices, to young for SOA"

— Alvaro Videla (@old_sound) April 3, 2015

"Java is to JavaScript what Alf is to Gandalf." @ddprrt #devoxx #lol pic.twitter.com/j7rp1DOJjS

— Cyril Lakech (@cyril_lakech) November 10, 2015

About simplicity... #NoEstimates pic.twitter.com/EdTPnhJQSO

— Nezumi Ronin (@NezumiRonin) December 20, 2015

Weekend Reader, Week 47

Highlights from AngularConnect 2015

The post is a very good overview about the progress of Angular 1 and 2.

Angular 1 ist still making progress. I am looking forward to the component syntax and also to the component router and the new internationalization features which both are shared with Angular 2.

I am a bit concerned about the ever growing scope of Angular 2:

• They plan to deliver their own command line interface called Angular-CLI for integrated tooling
• They want to support APIs in 4 languages: ES5, ES6, TypeScript and Dart
• They want to support the MV* pattern but also the Flux pattern for separation of concerns
• They want to support different rendering targets besides html to support native mobile applications
• They want to use WebWorkers to run most of the Angular code in a seperate process

I am really curious how all these features will turn out in regard to complexity and developer experience.

JavaScript Community in Bern

Just a reminder for the "Bärner JS Talks" happening next wednesday.

Very interesting topics, I am looking forward to all of the three talks.

The Thing about Bower

There is something going on around bower…

It was proclaimed dead on redit

One reason for that proclamaition was this discussion on github.

As a reaction the bower team posted the following post: Bower is alive, looking for contributors and started a crowd funding initiative.

Meantime in the Microsoft World, VisualStudio is still betting on the bower horse and improved the integration with a new Bower Package Manager UI for ASP.NET 5.

Personally I am currently a fan of modern JavaScript workflows based on NPM/Webpack or JSPM … no bower for me anymore.

If you want to get rid of bower, the following post might be a good starting point: Why We Should Stop Using Bower – And How to Do It

New Rules for JavaScript

Kyle Simpson ist known for having other opinions about “best practices” in JavaScript. In this video he questions many common practices and rules of current JavaScript programming.

Business: Nobody Wants Your App

An interesting article as an interesting following up on "Don’t base your business on a paid app"

The article shows the story of a startup that wanted to create an app … and was not that successful.
Interesting is that they had a good visibility, but nobody wanted to download for the app:

One download for every one thousand web views.

The conclusion:

The app world is so bloated, it’s overwhelming to the consumer.

I see that effect myself: Some years ago I was browsing the App store to detect new cool Apps, but now I can’t remember when I actually opened an App Store the last time…

Tools: Classeur

I am using Markdown a lot. For my courses and for blogging. But I am still looking for my favorite Markdown tooling. For some time I have been using StackEdit for blogging. Recently I discovered Classeur.io which makes a neat impression. I am writing this post right now in Classeur …

Programming Humor: FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition

Fizz Buzz is a famous programming exercise, suggested to be used in programming interviews. A solution in JavaScript might look like this.

Somebody made an enterprise version of Fizz Buzz in Java … Hilarious!

Tweets of the Week

Most JS/Python/Ruby apps... pic.twitter.com/hkDkjdxpFH

— Reuben Bond (@reubenbond) November 5, 2015

Critical Error: Tried doing Agile instead of being Agile @kjscotland #LKCE15 pic.twitter.com/54sotJ0zJ8

— Jose Casal (@jose_casal) November 16, 2015

Quo Vadis JavaScript?

JavaScript went through a makeover extraordinaire with ES2015 which was finalized this summer.

This is not your grandma’s JavaScript any more:

import React from 'react';

export default class Catalog extends React.Component {
    constructor(){
        super();
        ...
    }
    buy(product) {
        ...
    }
    render() {
        ...
    }
}

But it seems this was just the beginning… the metamorphosis is far from done for JavaScript.

For future versions of JavaScript there are many proposed new language features. Among the most outstanding proposals for me are decorators, async functions and private state

Some years ago nobody would have believed that the following snippets are (will be) valid JavaScript.

Decorators:

@createStore(alt)
@datasource(CatalogSource)
export default class CatalogStore {
    
    ...
    
    @bind(CatalogActions.searchLoaded)
    onSearchLoaded() {
        ...
    }
}

Async Functions:

async function fetchJson(url) {
    try {
        let request = await fetch(url);
        let text = await request.text();
        return JSON.parse(text);
    }
    catch (error) {
        console.log(`ERROR: ${error.stack}`);
    }
} 

Private State:

class DataObj {
  private #data1;

  constructor(d) {
    #data1 = d; 
  }

  get data() {
    return #data1;
  }
}

I think its now safe to say that Silverlight and Flex were failed attempts to bring other languages than JavaScript into browsers … but looking at the snippets above, it might sure look like some C#/Java infiltration squad sneaked into the Ecma building …

Babel and TypeScript both already support decorators and Babel also supports async functions (TypeScript is working on it). So you can use those language features right now in a modern JavaScript project setup.

Of course the JavaScript ecosystem/community is going through a tremendous development and learning process right now. We are slowly getting the new features piece by piece and figuring out how to use them … while that slow metamorphosis process can be healthy, it can also be painful…

In the future, once JavaScript has completed it’s metamorphosis, people might legitimately ask why we did not just integrate C# or Java into the browsers … ?

Karma and Protractor Illustrated

For my JavaScript / AngularJS workshops I created two illustrations to explain how unit-testing with Karma and end-to-end-testing with Protactor is working:

In both setups the code is running in the browser. The main difference is, that with Karma I am testing isolated ‘code-units’ that are run individually, there is no complete running application involved.
In the Protractor setup a complet running application has to be availabe and the test drives a browser to interact with this application.

Next Teaching Engagements

During winter 2015/16 I will deliver inhouse courses about development with JavaScript and AngularJS to teams at Puzzle ITC, mtrail GmbH, Mobiliar, Postfinance and SBB.

I will also deliver public courses for DigiComp and TechTalk:

At DigiComp my next course “Frontend-Entwicklung mit AngularJS” is scheduled for December 17th & 18th 2015 in Bern.
There are already enough registrations so that the course is guaranteed to take place, but there is still room for more participants …

I am delivering a three day course “Front-End Development with JavaScript, AngularJS and Visual Studio 2015” for TechTalk.
The course will take place:
- November 16th - 18th 2015 in Vienna
- January 25th - 27th 2016 in Zürich
… there are still places left.

Update 2015-12-01: Here is a nice summary from a participant of the course in Vienna.

Weekend Reader, Week 43

Angular Connect

Last Week was the Angular Connect conference in London.
Unfortunately Angular 2 is still alpha … the highly awaited beta version was not released at the conference.
Besides Angular 2, TypeScript and Reactive Extensions seem to be the technologies that you should start to look into for future develoment with Angular.
The sessions are available on YouTube, I am still catching up, but the qualtity of most sessions is very high.

The Angular team also updated the docs for Angular 2, definitely worth looking at …

JavaScript Community in Bern

Next Meetup of “Bärner JS Talks” is on November 25th.
Next Frontend Pizza is on November 3rd.

Don’t base your business on a paid app

The App and Play stores have turned out to be exceptionally poor places to run a software product business for most developers.

DHH (the creator of Ruby on Rails) argues against the myth of profitability of mobile app development today. Apps are a great distribution channels for services, but they are not the product you should try to make money with.

SVG Porn

Nice logos made with SVG.

A cartoon guide to Flux

Flux is not easy to grasp. This illustrated guide is a funny intro into the pattern.

The State of JavaScript on Android

the fastest known Android device available today performs 5× slower than a new iPhone 6s, and a little worse than a 2012 era iPhone 5

The post is highly interesting. It seems that iOS users are much better off using modern web sites and the Android ecosystem is actually threatening to hold back the progress of web technologies …

Is Eclipse Dying?

Eclipse is not the shiny thing every developer loves any more … but is it really that bad and is the predominant IDE dying?

Video: Web Development in 2020

Web Development in 2020 - Steve Sanderson from NDC Conferences on Vimeo.

Steve Sanderson looks into future trends of Web Development.
An interesting Presentation with a very funny intro.

Tweets of the Week

Why do (enterprise) projects try to behave like a startup? 95% of all startups fail.

— Roman Bertolami (@bertolami) October 21, 2015

Whether or not 10x engineers exist, 1/10th organizations are widespread – creating tons of obstacles to the productivity of their employees

— Nathan Marz (@nathanmarz) October 20, 2015

Enterprise agility. pic.twitter.com/bigRgzgSGe

— Alex Ley (@AlexEvade) October 14, 2015

React vs. Angular: A personal anecdote

I am currently working for a team that is about to build a web frontend for their in-house legacy system. The web frontend is basically a greenfield project, and the team can freely choose their technology stack.

I developed a small technology prototype in AngularJS and React. For both solutions I used npm and webpack as a build environement. In the AngularJS solution I used TypeScript and in the React solution I used ES2015 (formerly ES6) and Babel.

The prototype is here: https://bitbucket.org/jonasbandi/webshop/

I presented both solutions to the team, and let them decide which stack they like to choose for the actual project.

The team decided that they felt more comfortable with the solution based on React.

There were two main reasons:

• AngularJS is currently in a strange state, since Angular 2.0 is announced and hyped but not ready for production yet. If you start a project based on AngularJS now, you get the feeling that you are writing in a legacy technology right from the beginning.
• The React solution left a conciser impression and was clearer to grasp by the team. For example to realize a “component” in AngularJS you have to understand Directives (a DDO is pretty arcane for a newbie) and the implementation is spread over several entities (DDO, controller, template …). In contrast to that the approach of React to components is much easier to grasp.

This decision was made some weeks ago. In the meantime I set up the real project with the following components:

• A Build based on npm, webpack, Babel and ESLint (no gulp or grunt)
• React 0.14 / ReactRouter 1.0
• Flux architecture based on Alt.js
• Internationalization with i18next

Weekend Reader, Week 37

Security: How a bug in Visual Studio 2015 exposed my source code on GitHub and cost me $6,500 in a few hours

Wow! Amazon and the Hackers are both continuously scanning public repositories for passwords!
This story should make you reconsider where you leave your credit card information… things might get out of hand, even if you think that you are just using a free service …

Agile: Avoiding the most common pitfall of large-scale agile

Gojko wrote an interesting article about the current trend of scaling Agile. Unconventional as always, he draws anaglogies with “The Lord of the Rings” and escaping a concentration camp in WWII.
He argues that our industry is obsessed with effort instead of focusing on outcome.
His main explanaition why Agile does not scale in most attempts is:

On a small scale, effort does boost outcome.[…] On a larger scale, effort no longer directly relates to results.

Salary in IT: An endless topic on Quora

• What is it like making around $120K ~ $130K in the US in Sunnyvale, California as a software engineer?

• What is the salary range of Software Engineers in London?

Interesting to see different perspectives. Although I have a hard time to take the second answer seriously. In my experience not many enterprises are looking for the mythical “10x engineer” and are willing to pay these extravagant figures …

Stack overflow has also some info about salaries.

SwissJS: Videos of the sessions are online

If you missed SwissJS last July, the recorded sessions are now available on YouTube.
If you just want to watch one session, I recommend “Creating UIs for the WebA Audio API” by Stephen Band. His usage of the browser to create music is impressive and its a refreshing non-enterprisy topic.

Video: How to make your code sustainable

Christin Gorman is adressing the problem of over-engineering in typical business applications. This one is more serious than previous presentations by her, but she kept her refreshing way to present …

How to make your code sustainable - what they don't teach you - Christin Gorman from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Community: First JS Community Meeting in Berne

Four intereting talks. I am looking forward to this event …

Tweets of the Week

The only lasting frontend-dev trend in the last 10 years has been “Put stickers on laptops"

— Per Ploug (@pploug) September 9, 2015

haha @hijinksensue predicted this in 2012 pic.twitter.com/dCr4tc94vR

— Filip W (@filip_woj) September 9, 2015

Weekend Reader, Week 35

Web Dev: Stop pushing the web forward

Peter Paul Koch of QuirksMode argues that we are maneuvering the web into a dead end. Instead of trying to compete with native apps by cramming more and more features into browsers, we should focus on the web’s strengths: simplicity, URLs and reach.

We get ever more features that become ever more complex and need ever more polyfills and other tools to function — tools that are part of the problem, and not of the solution.

Web Dev: A hex editor in the browser

https://hexed.it/ - Just another instantiation of Attwood’s Law:

Any application that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript

Work: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies

In sum, the story of overwork is literally a story of diminishing returns: keep overworking, and you’ll progressively work more stupidly on tasks that are increasingly meaningless.

JavaScript: Angular 2 Migration

The supported migration scenario from Angular 1 to Angular 2 will not be based on the Angular New Router (aka. Component Router) any more (it seems as the New Router has been killed as a standalone project anyways). The Angular team posted a sophisticated plan how migration will look like. It looks interesting, but as far as I gather it’s still only a plan, the bits are not available yet …

WebDev: Phoenix Framework 1.0

The hype moves on: Elixr seems to get traction. And the Phoenix Framework is certainly worth having a look at for modern web development …

Online Education: A lucrative business

Online courses are sprouting out of the internet like mushrooms in autumn … I for myself have currently a subscription to Pluralshigt and to Egghead.io. But there is so much more …
The business seems to be lucrative, at least for some teachers …

Funny: Readable code - and the long lost secret of how to achieve it

(funny and provocative … see the comments)

Readable code - and the long lost secret of how to achieve it from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Tweets of the week

If you actually believe creating software takes 50 programmers and 75 people in mgmt, no wonder you think a couple of reports'll be cheaper

— Christin Gorman (@ChristinGorman) August 23, 2015

Trying to center something in CSS pic.twitter.com/BQfw8wq6gX

— Thomas Fuchs (@thomasfuchs) August 29, 2015

Weekend Reader, Week 34

A look at the United States Digital Service (USDS) - An agency to save government IT projects that got on the wrong track

The original enrollment system cost $200 million and would have required $70 million a year to maintain. The new version of the site cost $4 million to produce, with annual maintenance costs also $4 million.

There is a lot of debate whether the 10x developer is reality or not. But this article proves that the 10x team is definitely reality.
But the article also points out that it does not (only) depend on the people in the team, but also on the project setup: Is the team in a position to make a difference, or is it helplessly entangled in bureaucracy.

The biggest foe is generally risk aversion. People in government are trained to not do things differently because there’s often really bad consequences when you try something differently and it fails. We run up against this all the time

I also find the philosophy how the USDS attracts people and forms teams very interesting:

We don’t make career hires. We’re not building a career organization. […] We are relentless about trying to hang onto the ruthless mission focus here. We are built for short term appointments.

Agile: No. Agile Does Not Scale.

At small scale, Agile is great. At large scale, Agile is stupid.

Jurgen Appelo, the author of Management 3.0, gives his thought about the recent attempts to scale Agile and the fundamental flaw that at the base of all those methodologies that want to apply existing Agile practices at large:

Scaling Agile is indeed a problem, because the Manifesto doesn’t scale
in the first place. It was intended to describe small projects, not
large enterprises.

Agile: It used to be simple

SCRUMstudy turns my 16 page framework into 350+ page methodology. They didn't read Agile Manifesto.

— Ken Schwaber (@kschwaber) August 4, 2015

It is sad where Agile has ended up:

Once upon a time there was a new way of being. Then, much too fast, it became the old way. #sigh pic.twitter.com/CVgD4x8iXD

— Tobias Mayer (@tobiasmayer) August 22, 2015

Today consulting companies position themselves to help other companies to choose an Agile framework that fits their specific Agile needs:

Welches #Agile Modell passt zu meinem Unternehmen? http://t.co/tWOKJJyz7u #VergleichAgilerModelle #SwissQ pic.twitter.com/XAfBQPv0lx

— Sacha Czudek (@CzudekSacha) August 5, 2015

Agile: Simplicity and Unscaling

As we introduce agility into larger instances, we’re losing the very essence of agility that made it attractive in the first place.

We don’t have a scaling problem, we have a “trying to throw too many people at it” problem. We have a “love of size and scope” problem.

Work: Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture

So, I guess I should feel privileged to be born in Switzerland …

Funny: Snapchat murders Facebook

… an intro to Snapchat, ideal for old people like me who are still blogging and can’t stay up to date on the latest fashon in social networking:

Tweets of the week

Everything you need to know about the Enterprise in one handy graphic … pic.twitter.com/A2QJQnaGMJ

— swardley (@swardley) August 20, 2015

Everything you need to know about product development in one handy graphic … pic.twitter.com/s44Djp1Pvq

— swardley (@swardley) August 20, 2015

JavaScript vs. ECMAScript 2015

JavaScript, it might have been botched but we loved it because it was simple: Write the code and press reload.

ECMAScript 2015, formerly known as ECMAScript 6 … to use it today, you have to understand transpilation and module loading and deal with all the accidental complexity around Node.js, npm, webpack, babel, traceur, jspm, SystemJS etc.

ES2015 … for nerds that love toys?

The slides are from my JavaScript courses.

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

Weekend Reader, Week 30

SwissJS was Great!

Here are some good summaries:
- SwissJS 2015 - The JavaScript Conference To Meet and Socialise by nothing.ch
- Impressions of swissJS 2015 by Chaosmail Blog

History of Icons

A visual brief on icon history through different graphical user interfaces in different operating systems.
A neat site that reminds us how time is passing …

Startup Timelines

Another site that reminds us how time is passing …

Assessing Employee Performance: You’re Doing it Rong

Some interesting thoughts about tracking value and a lot of bashing of issue trackers.

Ironically, the best way to get fired for underperformance is to be a 10x developer.

Feature Toggles are one of the worst kinds of Technical Debt

Feature toggles are a (better) alternative to excessive feature branching, but guess what, they have their own problems … so we keep looking for the silver bullet.

Why you might not need MVC

React.js was critizising MVC from the beginning. I never understood the argumentation against MVC, 2-way-binding and the need for the Flux architecture. This article helped me to understand some of the concepts behind that argumentation.

The container revolution

A good writeup about how container technologies evolved and the consequences.

That means your developers can move faster, you can ship faster, you can iterate faster, your business grows faster – speed improves everything.

This Developers Life is back

After almost two years of silence they released a new episode … it does not top my favorite episode, but it’s well done.

The ??!??! operator in C

No joke: ??!??! is a valid operator in the C programming language …

Next Speaking Engagements

I will hold my workshop “JavaScript for real Developers: A survival Bootcamp” on September 1st at the “ch/open Workshoptage“.
I have been holding workshops at the “ch/open Workshoptage” for the last 9 years, and I think it is one of the best tech event in Switzerland.
It’s the third time I hold the “JavaScript for real Developers” workshop at the “ch/open Workshoptage” (but I have held the same content at many in-house trainings). The last two years the workshop was always fully booked in a short period of time.

Update July 31: The workshop is almost full, a re-run is scheduled.

I am proud that I was invited for the fifth time to speak at the annual SBB Developer Day on September 9th. I will give an introduction to TypeScript.

On August 3rd I will hold my course “Einführung in die Frontend-Entwicklung mit JavaScript und AngularJS” at DigiComp for the first time. The course is not yet fully booked, there is still time to register …

Weekend Reader, Week 29

The Software Paradox

A short book about the rise and fall of the commercial software market.

Product Backlog Bankruptcy!

I have been in teams where the effort to maintain (the illusion of) a backlog was just rediculous … the idea to declare the product backlog bankruptcy makes sense to me.

Agile & Scrum Go Mainstream

Ok, many teams in software development have moved past the scrum hype … but general management seems to just start discovering it.

Scrum is a Copernican revolution in management.

… I remain sceptical.

Monolith First

Martin Fowler about the current hype around microservices:

You shouldn’t start a new project with microservices, even if you’re
sure your application will be big enough to make it worthwhile.

Microservices and JavaEE: No paradox?

JavaEE desperately tries to be fashIonable by squeezing traditional application servers in the corset of microservices … I wonder if this is a good aproach:
- WildFly Swarm
- Payara Micro
- KumuluzEE

The birth and death of JavaScript

Another great talk (WAT is a classic!) by Gary Bernhard. Watch out for the point where he crosses from reality to fiction …

Some people seem pretty crazy

How Richard Stallman uses computers:

I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a
program that fetches them, and then mails them back to me.

I am in awe at all the obstacles he is willing to take on by staying true to his principles.

Funny: Introducing Atom 1.0

Atom is the text editor from GitHub based on web-technologies.

Upcoming JavaScript & AngularJS Workshop in Vienna

I will be giving a public JavaScript & AngularJS workshop in Vienna from July 6th to July 8th 2015.

If you are interested you can register here.

Thanks to my former employer TechTalk for organising the event.

Please contact us, if you are interested in a in-house course for modern JavaScript development (also covering topics like HTML5, ES6, AngularJS, React, Gulp, Grunt etc). 

The curious Life of JavaScript: The slides from my talk at SI-SE 2015

I had great fun presenting "The curious Life of JavaScript" at SI-SE 2015.
I went trough the demos and code examples very quickly, rather as a teaser to show how modern JavaScript development might look.

If you are interested in a deep dive into the topic of modern JavaScript development, HTML5, ES6, AngularJS, React, Gulp, Grunt etc, please consider my courses.