Ben Allfree :: Painless Programming

I’m building PrestoScript in Ruby and the more I get into it, the less I am in anyone’s framework but my own. Why is that? Is there a certain class of problems that are frameworkless? I’ve been thinking lately that generalized frameworks could be a farce. I always explain to clients that Ruby on Rails [...]

I run the “surgeon” model of development: an expert and one or more assistants.
The first place I read about the surgeon model was in Fred Brooks’ book, Mythical Man Month. In it, he describes a configuration where one expert uses several assistants. The expert tends to ambiguity: high-level crafting, planning, and architecture. The assistants [...]

erlang is a programming language that is supposed to be very scalable. It encourages a form of design that is naturally scalable and as such requires some degree of adjustment for many programmers. The whole idea doesn’t sit well with me.

I tripped across this link the other day. It describes my thinking about software design:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan

Here’s a topic that comes up a lot. What is a reasonable budget for your web site? $500? $1,000? Six weeks? Eight weeks?
Some of the earliest help I provide for people is determining what this number is.

I help a lot of people. Past a certain threshold, I need tools and systems to support that endeavor. Tracking all the little details for all the projects can get hectic. Yet at the same time, I want to keep what I do free of “policy” and other bureaucratic ideas. It’s a continual effort to [...]

Big Design misses important changes in software that Iterative Design addresses: (a) the shortening of timetables; (b) unpredictability of requirements; (c) vertical integration of software distribution.

This is a continuation of last week’s featured blog post.
There just aren’t that many long-term resource allocation strategies (“business ideas”) that can outperform existing configurations (“established competitors”) on a long-term basis. If you don’t know when to cut your losses, you will find yourself saddled with a business constantly in search of resources temporarily available [...]

This is a continuation of last week’s featured blog post.
Success is directly linked to how closely you can align capital and resources with their most productive uses. A business which continually requires discounted resources to function indicates a problem. Economics are against you.

Value per hour is a great discussion. Most people think programmers are like laborers, all roughly equal because the job is the job and someone needs to do it. It’s just a bunch of heavy lifting.