Open Source Jam (osjam) – designing stuff that gets used by people
On Thursday I went to Google’s offices to check out the Open Source Jam. I’d meant to check them out before and since I was finally free on the right night and the topic was ‘Designing stuff that gets...
View ArticleHow I do documentation: a column of bumph and a column of gold
All programmers hate documentation, right? But I’ve discovered a way to make it less painful and I’m posting in case it helps anyone else. The first trick is to start documenting as soon as you start...
View ArticleThumbs up to Migratr (and free and open goodness)
[Update: Migratr downloads all your files to the desktop, with your metadata in an XML file, so it’s a great way to backup your content if you’re feeling a bit nervous about the sustainability of the...
View Article20% time – an experiment (with some results)
A company called Atlassian have been experimenting with allowing their engineers 20% of their time to work on free or non-core projects (a la Google). They said: You see, while everyone knows about...
View ArticleA call for agile museum projects (a lunchtime manifesto)
Yet another conversation on twitter about the NMOLP/Creative Spaces project lead to a discussion of the long lead times for digital projects in the cultural heritage sector. I’ve worked on projects...
View ArticleAgile development presentation, dev8D
These are my very rough notes on Grahame Klyne‘s talk on Agile Development as JISC’s dev8D event in February. Grahame works with bioinformatics and the semantic web at the zoology department of Oxford...
View ArticleWoohoo!
The results of JISC’s dev8D ‘developer happiness’ prize have been announced – congratulations to List8D and their “web 2.0-friendly reading lists” – it’s something I’d love to see in my own uni course....
View ArticleChristian Heilmann on Yahoo!’s YQL, open data tables, APIs
My notes from Christian Heilmann‘s talk on ‘Reaching those web folk’ with Yahoo!’s new-ish YQL, open data tables and APIs at the National Maritime Museum [his slides]. My notes are a bit random, but...
View ArticlePerformance testing and Agile – top ten tips from Thoughtworks
I’ve got a whole week and a bit off uni (though of course I still have my day job) and I got a bit over-excited and booked two geek talks (and two theatre shows). This post is summarising a talk on Top...
View ArticleMuseums and iterative agility: do your ideas get oxygen?
Re-visiting the results of the survey I ran about issues facing museum technologists has inspired me to gather together some great pieces I’ve read on museum projects moving away from detailed up-front...
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