Seth Ladd's Blog

When Douglas Crockford talks about Software Quality , you should listen. If you are involved in writing software and need to understand why software is difficult, or if you are planning a software project, you need to watch this presentation. Includes such gems as "No rational person can do software", "Programmers don't understand how they spend their time", and "If you took all the code you wrote over the past year, you could probably type it into the computer in one day." One of my favorites: "Programming is a social activity." Oh, and mad props to Crockford for drawing a parallel between building software and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House . Not only is it a funny movie, it's one of my Mom's favorites. While Crockford found many apt parallels, he unfortunately was wrong about one. Software construction is not nearly as funny as this movie. Partially related to this presentation is Joel 's article on Five Ways to Fa...

A lot of gems in Software Is Hard , some choice examples: The Ninety-Ninety Rule : "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time." and Rosenberg's Law: Software is easy to make, except when you want it to do something new. and Alan Kay, the father of Smalltalk: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." and Weinberg's Second Law: "If builders built houses the way programmers built programs, the first woodpecker to come along would destroy civilization."

baetle is an ontology for software bugs and bug tracking systems. Henry Story has opened the baetle project on Google Code . baetle is an effort to standardize a view into the software bug tracking world. There are a kazillion bug tracking systems out there . Heck, see for yourself . So what's a use case for being able to have a consistent view into bugs and issues across all thoses systems? For one, you could query one system just like another system. Another use case might be if your enterprise runs and maintains multiple different bug tracking systems, and you need to query across all of them. Hmm, sounds like a Data Warehouse, doesn't it? Multiple systems combined and filtered into one cohesive view for reporting and querying. Ontologies allowing for a way to combine and filter all those data sources. SPARQL for all that querying. So is Ontologies and SPARQL the new ETL ?

Project Aardvark is a movie about: > Four interns are brought into Manhattan and given 12 weeks to design, develop, debug and ship a program that will change the way computer geeks around the world fix their friends' computers. Boondoggle Films presents a journey through the world of software development from the perspective of a unique upstart, four quirky interns, and the world of The Geek.