This quote from the Passionate Programmer book captures the essence of the elevator pitch quite well:
At General Electric, there is an urban legend that former CEO Jack Welch used to enjoy getting on the elevator of one of the tall GE buildings with whatever random GE employee might have gotten on with him. He would then turn and ask the already-frightened underling, “What are you working on?” and then (here’s where it might hurt) “What is the benefit of that?” The moral of the story was that you should always have your elevator speech ready, just in case.
The development of Zend Framework 2 is getting very interesting. Especially the part with Pyrus. I hope Zend will come up with a packaging system like CPAN.
Just discovered a great, free book “The Architecture of Open Source Applications”. A must read for every developer. Here is an excerpt of the introduction:
“Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings written by masters. In contrast, most software developers only ever get to know a handful of large programs well — usually programs they wrote themselves — and never study the great programs of history. As a result, they repeat one another’s mistakes rather than building on one another’s successes. This book’s goal is to change that.”
In a fresh Bliki post Martin Fowler describes Command Query Responsibility Segregation Pattern. The main idea is the separation of domain logic in query model (read operations) and command model (insert, update, delete).
Great article, but the use cases for the pattern are not really clear yet.
Vic Cherubini published an article about Algorithmically Estimating Developer Time. The approach is based on story points (found in many agile frameworks) and therefore user stories.
Finally found a link I could use next time someone starts the we-don’t-need-automated-tests-discussion: Alternatives to Acceptance Testing.
Internet might kill us all. This makes the question, “Are we in a tech bubble?” seem a bit ironic. Great (as always) article by Steve Blank.