Bookmark this page for when you have a free hour. It’s worthed!
I can’t wait to see it on the market. More details on wave.google.com.
An incredibly cool movie.
It’s funny because is true.
How will the future look? Here is Microsoft’s point of view:
I consider Microsoft’s point of view to be very optimistic. I’m not sure that in only 10 we’ll reach that level of technology, and even if we do, there will be a lot of people that will reject it, due to traditions, personal convictions that it “was better back in the days”, religious beliefs and so on. And, before developing that technology, we should figure out some new energy sources, to have enough juice to power it all. But the ideas expressed in the movie are impressive, not the less…
Credits for finding the movie go to Radu.
Simple and quick. Unix style 
I’ve seen this video today
…and it made me think a lot about my life and my career. Most of the technologies I’ve studied in a classroom are now obsolete. Or were already obsolete at the time I was studing them. It’s very morale damaging knowing that you’re studing something just to pass an exam and that you’ll never use that knowledge ever again. But I wasn’t discouraged by the educational system and I’ve spent a lot reading and experimenting on my own and that’s how I’ve got a pretty good programmer. Really! I was always appreciated by my work colleagues and considered to be the guy that they could always ask for help. But still, I can’t even write a louzy string comparison in ASM without using Google. That’s not because I didn’t want to learn that or that I consider ASM knowledge to be useless and obsolete like other people do, but because there is simply to much information out there and not enough time to learn it all. And it multiplies at an ever increasing rate. Ajax as we know it – with the XMLHttpRequest object – was coined in 2005, less than 4 years ago. Now it’s impossible to find a job description in the web programming field that doesn’t include Ajax. Today’s experiments will be next year’s job requirements. Our generation will always have to adapt to world that’s changing like never before.
So I’ve decided to expand my education and skills and I’ve made a list with things I want to do this year:
- improve my knowledge of the Zend Framework – the target is to pass the Zend Framework Certified Engineer exam
- improve my knowledge of the Linux operating system – the target is to pass the Comptia Linux+ exam
- improve my command of the English language – the target is to pass pass the Cambridge exam
- learn a little bit of German – no ambitious target here as I can’t really set a target, now that my level in German is below zero
- get my bachelor degree – after all these long years, it’s about time
- take a race driver course – a hobby for now, but one can never know what the future holds;)
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to complete the list, but I’ll try hard and I’m going to look back to this post on the 31 of December and see how much I’ve accomplished. And of course, start a new list with “to-learn”s for 2010.
Few days ago, I’ve watched a presentation on TED Talks about the computer’s user interface held by Anand Agarawala. It’s extremely interesting, so sacrifice 5 minutes of your lives and watch this video. It’s worth every second!
Impressive, isn’t it? But the question that pops in my mind is would I really like that kind of User Interface? I think not. Especially now, after I’ve gotten used to the point-and-click one. It’s like walking and driving a car, it’s natural and intuitively to walk but once I’ve learned to drive and interact with the car via its wheel, pedals and gear stick interface, any attempt to drive a car that was supposed to be handled with a revolutionary interface that would make driving similar to walking would quickly turn me in an even greater menace that I already am.
The interface is funny to use, but after a some time it gets boring. It could be more intuitive and help old people use the computer, but by the time this interface will be widely used, we will be the “old people”. I think it’s a very interesting experiment, just like dontclick.it was 5 years ago, but I doubt that will ever hit the market.
I’m waiting for the vocal computer interface, just like they had in Star Trek.
When I started my programming career, I was convinced that waterfall is the way to go. I felt the need to have clear specifications for the project I was working on since the very beginning. The let me see what you’ve done so far e-mails from the customers were a real pain in the ass, because since no partial releases were scheduled, I usually had to pick and choose parts of the project that seemed to work and build an adhoc release. The result was what one might call a Frankenstein of software development that had major bugs, didn’t quite work and the only thing it could do right was to annoy everybody. The client was annoyed because he was feeling that his money are not well spent and I was annoyed because I was stuck with a meddling client who doesn’t stick to the agreed plan. If the release isn’t scheduled for another three months, the he should go and bother somebody else. Maybe a government employee from the IRS. But instead of doing just that, the client was sending bug reports – fix this, change that – on the “Franky version”. So the project was slowly branching into two. We had to continue the development of the main branch, as initially agreed, but we also had to do some bug fixing and changes to the adhoc version. Fixing those bugs was taking away valuable development time and the estimated time of delivery was being pushed further and further in the distant future.
Now that he could see parts of the software, the client was changing his mind about some of the specifications and was asking for new features that weren’t originally planed. Features that were incompatible with what we’ve done so far. And…long story short: epic fail!
After spending about 2 years in the waterfall hell, I have found out about Agile development and scrum. It’s a whole different approach that divides a large scale project into smaller parts that are easier to implement, easier to test and easier to change if the customer changes his mind. In the current economical climate, even without meddling customers, a waterfall approach to software development is bound to fail. Imagine how things looked 12 months ago and how they look now. A software project must be able to adapt quickly and meet the market’s requests.
I have found this video on Adobe’s (Romania) blog that explains agile development and scrum in about 10 minutes. Enjoy!
The above video was created by Axosoft – a company that specializes in creating scrum software. If you find that video interesting, check out their site or their twitter feed @axosoft.