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Elements or attributes, the eternal question
Sunday, May 10 2009
Nice take on when to use attributes in XML here.
Tags: xml ~ linky
When automated tagging goes odd
Wednesday, July 09 2008
Archives New Zealand’s National Collection of War Art is a pretty good site, in glorious XHTML.
I was interested to see that they have a tag cloud, presumably generated out of photograph metadata, and that right up there with Italy, desert, jungle and New Zealand division is… moustache.
Tags: funny ~ linky ~ metadata ~ taggingThe most depressingly true thing I read today
Tuesday, October 30 2007
This post from Reginald Braithwaite sums up everything I always suspected was wrong with software project management. (It also has cautionary observations about startups that aren’t quite so universal).
…We have a really simple way of completing successful software projects: we put successful people on them. But we have a broken way of thinking about it: we don’t like to think of the people as being special, we think that what the people do is successful.
And by that logic, we can take anyone, have them do the same things as successful people, and our projects will succeed.
In a manager’s mind, the measure of whether information is good or not is, Does it measure whether people are doing the same things that successful people have done on projects I’ve been told were successful?
This is not the same thing as measuring whether the project is on its way to success at all. This measures the outward appearance of a project. Things that can be measured easily are rarely the most significant things. Behaviours that can be “gamed,” like how many hours a team is working, will be gamed.
And as above, even if a manger knows better, does her manager know better? If not, good information will be difficult to sell and she will be under a lot of pressure to serve Lemon Pie.
Off balance sheet transactions
There’s another important reason that projects have bad information: the best information is off balance sheet. That’s an expression meaning something a businessperson sweeps under the rug. Try Googling Off Balance Sheet Transaction. It’s never pretty.
In essence, project plans and reports never include the most important information about the likelihood of project success. Never. (I mean never in the same sense that Joel Spolsky means “nobody,” as in “fewer than 10,000,000 project plans”)…
Tags: software ~ management ~ linky
Shelly Powers: the Parable of the Languages
Thursday, October 11 2007
Tags: programming ~ xml ~ linky ~ funnyRendered at 2010-03-11 17:45:43