confused of calcutta

In my last post I mentioned how much I enjoyed reading what he had to say. I now find he has a blog as well, to be found here. A taster, taken from this post entitled Surprising Findings On Software Reuse:
Kevin DeSouza and his colleagues in a recent article in the Communications of the ACM [...]

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A prefatory note: I am not ashamed of being called Utopian.
When I started full-time “work” nearly thirty years ago, straight out of university, I had no idea what to expect. So I imagined that work was a natural extension of university. And for me, university was a natural extension of school: I attended a Jesuit [...]

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The kernel for this particular snowball was a conversation over dinner, where someone asked me how I dealt with all the flames against my blog.
My answer to him was pretty much off-the-cuff, I didn’t spend time trying to figure it out. I told him that the number of flames was negligible. He then followed up [...]

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I remember a tale about an American golfer many years ago, I think his name was Big Mo. [Google couldn't help me out here, so if any of you can corroborate any of this please comment away].
Big Mo was a good golfer. A very good golfer. Now this was in the days of driving for [...]

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I’ve been thinking more about this ever since my last post on the subject, a whole day or so ago. And I remembered something I’d heard Clay Shirky say:
#3b. Good tools allow users to do stupid things.
A good tool, a tool which maximizes the possibilities for unexpected innovation from unknown quarters, has to allow the [...]

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I’m going to be lazy and use parts of Wikipedia’s summary of The Mythical Man-Month. And make a few assertions as to why we may need to revisit the whole shebang. Yup, another very provisional post. More musing than thinking.
The Mythical Man-Month: When we develop for the web, are there really any more large teams [...]

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Wish I was a Kellogg’s Cornflake/Floating in my bowl taking movies
Relaxing a while/Living in style
Talking to a rais’n ‘cas’nally played LA
Casually glancing at his toupee
Simon and Garfunkel, Punky’s Dilemma
Love those lyrics, the meaninglessness of everything they portray. I have this image of the cornflake wearing sunglasses and a beret and a loud red shirt while [...]

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You may remember that in a recent post of mine, I linked to an essay by Paul Graham on What Business Can Learn from Open Source. Fascinating essay. I hadn’t read much of Paul since his LISP days, just the occasional wander over to his site. My bad.
Reading that essay made me go out and [...]

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Sean pointed me at this post by Dave Morin. People who walk away from plum jobs because we won’t let them work the way we taught them to. People who expect to be able to IM and use internet mail at work. People who will expect to bring their own laptops to work, it is [...]

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Smart companies try to commoditise their products’ complements.
So said Joel Spolsky in an article on the economics of open source four years ago; if you haven’t read it, you can find the article here; it can also be found in that excellent collection of articles published as Joel on Software.
I’ve been musing on stuff recently; [...]

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