Programming, usability etc.
Great guide to low-cost usability testing. 168 pages, so reading it slowly takes 2 hours and those hours just fly by. Generally books on the practical part of testing are kinda boring, but this one is really easy to read.
I have this AMD 4850e/4GB non-ECC RAM/2,6TB/WS2008 serving files and other needs around the apartment. No RAID, no formal backups etc. Some of the more important stuff is on couple of disks and in the cloud etc. At first I intented to buy only 2 more hard drives, adding maybe 2-3TB. Then I got this [...]
I’ve been toying with Django for a week or so and started building a simple CRUD app. Essentially it is a todo list software. Mainly this is because it is suitably small project and it is also scratching my own itch. For the latter correct solution would be to be lazy and use Todoist or [...]
Interesting finding from a research article by Jeffrey Stylos and Steven Clarke A comparative study was performed to assess how professional programmers use APIs with required parameters in objects’ constructors as opposed to parameterless “default” constructors. It was hypothesized that required parameters would create more usable and selfdocumenting APIs by guiding programmers toward the correct [...]
I’ve been reading Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox columns since late 90s and developed kind of usability nazi attitude. Not the worst characteristic to have as users rarely have enough advocates. However I’ve come to realize that there is a false dichotomy between usability and graphic design as there is only one user experience. Both need to [...]
Scrum et al. – Ken Schwaber Really good presentation about scrum and the philosophy behind it. Great point about the implicit cutting of quality when it seems that project isn’t done at deadline. It’s a recurring theme in software project management literature, but bears repeating.
Recently there was a discussion on Slashdot about code comments. As always it’s mostly people building straw-men and all-out-attacking them. Still, entertaining read. My own commenting practice boils down to: code is up-to-date, hence better to write just verbose code than dense code and comment it explain the “why” in comments Ie. the general Clean [...]
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