Author Archives: Benjamin

Java Builds with Gradle

By Benjamin | Published: January 10, 2011
I’ve been working on Java projects for years now and the two primary build systems for such projects have been Ant and (more recently) Maven. Both have given me headaches for various reasons and lately I just find Maven increasingly cumbersome to use. Yes, the dependency management features are great (most of the time) and [...]
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Stop Doing Agile

By Benjamin | Published: November 10, 2010
I mentioned some time back that where I work we do Agile software development. This phrase, though accurate in some sense, shows a certain misunderstanding of what Agile is. Sure, you might ‘do’ Scrum, or ‘practice’ XP or Kanban or Lean or whatever, but you don’t ‘do’ Agile. You adopt these processes as a starting [...]
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TechZing – Embrace the Morning Commute

By Benjamin | Published: November 4, 2010
I mentioned last time that I was going to try listening to podcasts as part of an optimized information intake process. I found a few that looked interesting and downloaded several episodes of each. I happened to start with one called TechZing with Justin Vincent and Jason Roberts (and really, with a tag line like [...]
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Intake Optimization

By Benjamin | Published: October 31, 2010
Time is one of the few constants of human experience. At a fundamental level, our time is the only thing that we can really own or truly spend. We can trade it for money which we can in turn trade for things, but our lives ultimately come down to our very small and finite amount [...]
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The Agile Analyst

By Benjamin | Published: October 28, 2010
Traditional software development has many roles – architects, systems analysts, quality assurance, developers, project managers, the list goes on. Agile development doesn’t define nearly as many roles, simply that teams are cross-functional groups of five to nine people with some type of facilitator role. Most Agile variants assume that most of the team will act [...]
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Going Forward

By Benjamin | Published: October 25, 2010
As I mentioned in the last post, I’ve been doing some reflecting recently, both on how this site is going (or, of late, not going) and about life in general. In doing so, I’ve learned a bit about myself. Of course, you’d think after being so close to me for all of my life that [...]
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Reflections

By Benjamin | Published: October 22, 2010
It’s been three months since I started this site and quite some time has passed since my last post. Over the past few days I took some time to reflect on why that is. I wish I could say “I’ve been busy”. While I have been somewhat, it’s no busier than I was when I [...]
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Classic Blunders

By Benjamin | Published: September 2, 2010
Today I almost fell prey to one of the classic blunders. No, I’m not talking about land wars in Asia or going in against a Sicilian when death is on the line. This was one of the classic software development blunders. There are several of these, but the one I’m referring to is building something [...]
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Enterprise Viscosity

By Benjamin | Published: August 26, 2010
Agile software development includes a set of terms which convey the forward progress of team. These include concepts like ‘Velocity’ and ‘Burndown’. One day, quite by accident, I was saying something witty or sarcastic and introduced the phrase Enterprise Viscosity. While I don’t advocate making it an official part of any parlance, it’s a useful [...]
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The Metaphors We Build By

By Benjamin | Published: August 20, 2010
The practice of software development is frequently described in terms of metaphors. The point being to establish a non-obvious connection or analogy between the creation of abstract logical structures executed by computers and other pursuits that are somehow similar. Metaphors are powerful cognitive constructs by which two words or ideas are linked by association or [...]
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