Launching a 350+-ton peice of metal-loaded-with-people-and-cargo is a bit of a technical feat, not entirely unlike shipping any reasonably complex piece of software. Boeing 737 airspeed indicatorsection of theprimary flight display That’s why those doing it day in and day out focus so much on procedures designed to increase the odds of repeatably successful Read More
Late last year, I had the opportunity to attend Agile/Scrum training led by one of the experts in the field, Kenny Rubin. Like many developers and software shops, I’ve done “agile [lowercase 'a'] software development” in the past, but had never had a rigorous explanation of the details of Agile, so the day-long training offering Read More
A colleague recently recommended Robert Glass’ The Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering1. Having recently finished Isaacson’s Jobs bio (finally!), I was able to start it today. The forward2 launches the book with a bang: The software industry is in the same state of affairs that the pharmaceutical industry was in during the late nineteenth Read More
@cheeseplus1 pointed me to a post this week by the always-engaging2 Bruce Schneier covering yet-another Transportation Security Agency snafu. Schneier’s summation of the event: TSA screener finds two pipes3 in passenger’s bags. Screener determines that they’re not a threat. Screener confiscates them anyway, because of their “material and appearance.” Because they’re not actually a threat, Read More