Agile Project Management Planning and Budgetting

Great presentation via InfoQ by David Hussman.

Liskov Substitution in Dynamic Languages

A nice discussion on Michael S. Feathers blog.

Jim Weirich observes:

The original LSP is defined in terms of types and subtypes, not classes and subclasses. In Ruby, we try to remind people that type is not related to class. It seems to me that LSP still applies to dynamic languages, even if there is no direct language construct for type.

Also a link to dynamic/static type contracts (interfaces).

Gmail Tricks

found here:

Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it'll still get to your inbox. It's called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here's how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

More real world examples:

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com
Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.

Automatically label your incoming mail: I've talked about that above.

Archive your mail: If you receive periodic updates about your bank account balance or are subscribed to a lot of mailing lists that you don't check often, then you can send that sort of mail to the archives and bypass your Inbox.

Example: For the mailing list, you could give pinkyrocks+mailinglist1@gmail.com as your address, and assign a filter that will archive mail to that address automatically. Then you can just check in once in a while on the archive if you want to catch up.

Software Development as Turkey

from Darren Hobbs entry:

You can't achieve the same effect when roasting a turkey by doubling the temperatuire and halving the cooking time. Similarly a project cannot have the number of people doubled and the duration halved and get the same result. The rate of knowledge crunching is not increased by adding more people.

Closures in Java

Another post with links.

From Debasish blog, a link to Gilad Bracha's blog entry (with some nice comments)
Pick from post:

One question that naturally arises is "what took you so long?".
...
Since the late 90s, I've brought the topic up now and again. At times, even I have reluctantly been convinced that it is too late, because we've done so many things that would have been easy with closures in different ways. This means the benefits aren't as high as in a language like Scheme, or Self, or Smalltalk. The cost is non-trivial, to be sure.

Pick from the comments:

SUN never cared to implement Closures in Java.The reason why they are caring about now is Microsoft introduced them in C#.

So the funda is IF YOU WANT A NEW FEATURE IN JAVA DONT ASK SUN,(ITS TIME WASTE), BETTER ASK MICROSOFT, ONCE MS IMPLEMENTS THAT FEATURE IN THEIR LANGUAGE, THE NEXT YEAR SUN WILL CONSIDER THAT FEATURE. (This is also the quickest way of getting your favourite feature in JAVA).

(1st enums, support for dynamic languages, now closures...) :D

And a link to jaggregate examples.