Blogs

Photos from XP2006. 18 June 2006

June 25, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Photos from the second tutorial day of the XP2006 conference.

If you know some people on the photos, please, comment and I'll add the names to the captions.

Tutorial "From concept to cash: Deliver fast" by Mary and Tom Poppendieck

Meet you at XP2006!

May 18, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

The 7th International conference on eXtreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering is going to take place on June 17-22, 2006, Oulu, Finland. According to the program, despite its name the conference is going to be focused more on the Agile Processes, than exactly on XP.

Among the speakers there are Kent Beck, the father of eXtreme Programming; Mike Cohn, the founder of Mountain Goat Software - strong Scrum supporter; Michael Feathers, author of Working Effectively with Legacy Code and a lot of other Agile Alliance founding members and board members.

Why premature optimization is the root of all evil. In the management language

April 8, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

The program optimization is performed in order to reduce the execution time, memory usage, bandwidth or some other resource. Optimization essentially means sacrificing the clear, simple and understandable code architecture. As a result the level of complexity increases, debugging and restructuring becomes more time-consuming and more expensive.

It is simply a lot cheaper to get a clear working and testing code before the start of the optimization. As a side effect, a set of unit tests (if you practice them) will protect you from the potential regression coming from the optimization actions.

Being evil is expensive

April 5, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Once upon a time in a continent far-far away (from Europe) there was a mighty spreadsheet software vendor called Lotus Development Corporation. Their product Lotus 1-2-3 dominated the niche with its almost 100% market share. There was a neglectibly small competitor product named Microsoft Excel. The Microsoft's product better met user needs, integrated well with the word processor and in general was a good product. Unfortunately the Lotus'es overwhelming user base left not a lot of chances for any competitor whatever good he was.

The Microsoft worked real hard to lower the enry barrier. They mailed demo packages by post, built the Lotus-to-Excel convertors, even created a special version of the Windows OS, that could be started without the installation and could run the MS Excel trial only - pretty much everything, that could eliminate the trialing efforts. And the most cunning trick of the Microsoft generals was to introduce the really good Excel-to-Lotus convertor. Yes, you heard it right, Microsoft released the tool that customers could use to switch back to their old good Lotus 1-2-3 whenever they decide that Excel isn't worth any further trials.

Performancing Metrics Module

March 25, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Performancing.com lately launched a beta of the very cool blog statistics service. It is created especially for bloggers with the AdSense click and comment counter. I don't like modifying the theme templates just to include the yet another statistics counter. So I created a small and simple Drupal module for PMetrics. And decided to share it with everybody interested :)

If you are running Drupal, simply upload the PMetrics module to your modules directory and enable it in the admin/modules. That's it. No extra settings required. Register at Performancing and analyze your logs.

Waterfall 2006

March 19, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

A great sample of satire: Waterfall 2006 conference.

After years of being disparaged by some in the software development community, the waterfall process is back with a vengeance. You've always known a good waterfall-based process is the right way to develop software projects. Come to the Waterfall 2006 conference and see how a sequential development process can benefit your next project. Learn how slow, deliberate handoffs (with signatures!) between groups can slow the rate of change on any project so that development teams have more time to spend on anticipating user needs through big, upfront design.

Error handling

March 11, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

Check out the post on error handling by Mika Raento, the researcher at the University of Helsinki, Forum Nokia Champion and the author of the huge amount of free source code examples for Symbian.

Mika talks on the ways of error handling in software and how the developer can aid the error handling:

• You may need to document specific errors and supply additional information to the immediate caller.

Compilable Symbian Code Examples

February 7, 2006 by Artem Marchenko

SymbianExample.com is eventually up and running. It took quite some time to restart it, but I am very much pleased with the results. It is build on the Drupal CMS 4.7 Beta 4. As it is still beta, I disabled comments - they work ok, but display error-like messages, when you post. They will be enabled whenever Drupal community releases the next Beta or RC of the 4.7 (sometime in February)

Nevertheless, the site looks great (as for me) and I am extremely pleased with the customization possibilities, to be enabled one by one in the close future.

And by the way.

Series 60 examples

November 22, 2005 by Artem Marchenko

Today I've spent several hours trying to locate a simple example for the Nokia's Series 60 3rd edition. And miserably failed.

At the moment I am developing my first 3rd edition application. It is also the first app, where I am going to use vector icons in the svg format (introduced in Series 60 2nd edition Feature Pack 3). Somehow in all my previous projects I did the non-UI components only and never bothered about the application wrap-up.

Today in the morning I found that even though I have access to a lot of 3rd edition applications, I don't have a single simple example. As you might guess the attempts to "intelligently copy" the existing code failed.

Welcome to SymbianExample.com

October 17, 2005 by Artem Marchenko

www.SymbianExample.com is up and running. In perfect accordance to the Agile Manifesto's "Working software over comprehensive documentation", design is far from perfect, e-mail is not functioning, no forum installed, but it is up and running. You can already find there a launcher of ExeDll projects and sample code for global key capturing (including a tricky case of long key press capturing).