January 7th, 2010 › illotus › no comments
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 be taken into account when designing pretty much anything. Both actually are done for the user. Or should be. The usability evangelist in me does say that usability is in general more for the user than graphic design as the latter can more easily be warped to other goals than great user experience.
Tags: usability, user experience
January 4th, 2010 › illotus › no comments
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.
Tags: scrum, software development
January 2nd, 2010 › illotus › no comments
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 Code
& Code Complete
way.
Tags: programming style, software development
December 28th, 2009 › illotus › no comments
There is whole lotta stuff I want to learn or relearn. Like
- C
- design patterns
- programming language design
- agile
- tdd
- information structuring
to name a few.
I studied C back in 2002-2003 and C++ with touch of Symbian later. However I’m not sure if I should include those in my CV. Design patterns I did read about few years back, but I’ve never needed one at work. Or maybe I just didn’t recognize the need at the time.
Language design is something that is really interesting. After I read Joe Armstrongs interview I really wanted to dive at it, but realistically that will have to wait.
I imagine that agile and tdd go hand in hand as both are pretty hot now. I’ve toyed with tdd, but at my job almost all programming I do is maintenance so changing everything to tdd style doesn’t really make business sense.
Luckily I get to study information structuring when writing my thesis as I’ll be doing some card sorting exercises. It’ll be fun to see how different user model is compared to a currently used information structure.
Tags: learning, studies
December 26th, 2009 › illotus › no comments
I’ve been reading the Coders at Work
during Christmas and one thing keeps nagging at me: the expertise of the interviewed programmers is narrow. There are a few who are more of the Jack-Of-All variety, but most just have mostly done one thing, but done it a lot.
This kinda leads to thinking how much your first couple of jobs shape your career? My first programming job was building a web application on .Net with VB(back in 2005-2006). After that I’ve done a bit of Perl during my civil service and continue that as an employee(must have done something right during the civil service). Now does this make me a web programmer?
These couple of jobs have certainly laid the groundwork to continue the path to truly being web developer. It’s just that I’m not sure if that’s the path I want to take in long term. In the short term writing some simple Perl scripts and maintaining bunch of web app wrapper scripts does give me some perspective to what good and clean code is.
In some answer at Stackoverflow there was a remark “hell is other peoples Perl” along the lines of Sartre. Little harsh maybe, but there is a seed of truth there. I guess the problem is the same with any language(eg. PHP and Javascript) that is used by many non-programmers.
Tags: career, perl
December 18th, 2009 › illotus › no comments
I want to brush up my written English skills and put down my thoughts on various topics like:
- programming
- usability
- books
- career
This will likely be project type blog, like my previous blog. I would be surprised if I’m still writing in 6 months time.
The choice really was either this or Twitter. Sadly WordPress is so easy to setup that I didn’t start to write my own blogging engine, though the temptation was great. But as several sources point out, certain kind of laziness is important quality in developer.
Also I have my Masters thesis to write, this is practice for that. It’ll be a comparison of usability evaluation methods in library website context likely with card sorting thrown in.
Tags: meta
