I had a Google Hangout today with Ward Cunningham, creator of the wiki and his newer project Federated Wiki. I have my own wiki instance, spent the day discussing support for a project in Oregon using wiki and how I can help. It was good to catch up with Ward, I am looking forward to working with him.
The Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress attempts to make it much easier to create customized displays for and format each of these types of posts (and many more). It leverages the flexibility and power of WordPress to be your single social media hub while, along with other IndieWeb friendly plugins, still allowing you to interact with other social networks.
The debt metaphor in software development
In a new post, Ward Cunningham shares his thoughts on the “debt metaphor” in software development. One of the points he brings out is that programming can be thought of as making decisions now on the functionality of the program and deferring others to a later time (debt), with the understanding that as the program matures, refactoring can occur to make the program more efficient/better (paying back the debt).
In my experience in avionics software development, the creation of software is driven by approved requirements. As requirements change or are refined, the software is updated to be consistent with those requirements. One type of “debt” I see is when functionality is not completed on time, and gets deferred to a later software release (cost increase). Another type is when a problem is found (requirements, source code, tests, documents), but addressing the problem is deferred to a future time (the problem does not impact the functionality of the requirements, source code, or tests, or is deemed not a safety issue). This type of debt (typically called “open problem reports” (OPRs) is getting more scrutiny by aircraft certification agencies and OEMs (Bombardier, Boeing, etc.), since they see increasing numbers of OPRs as an indicator that the overall “health” of the software may not be as good as it should be, and that there should be as few OPRs as possible (in other words, fix your problems as you find them).
For myself, I prefer to fix problems when they come up. However, when you work as a member of a team, sometimes business decisions dictate otherwise….
Itty-Bitty: This app (link to Github) encodes a web page in the URL. I have not figured out how this works yet, but would like to….
Reply to “IndieWeb Summit 2018 Recap”
Chris Aldrich attended the IndieWeb Summit in June 2018 and summarized his experiences in a recent post. It sounds like quite a lot of development occurred, as well as good discussions. I will check out the videos/recordings from the event, it sounds like it is well worth the time.
Test-Driven Development with Python: Book on using TDD for Django development (there is a link to read online for free!), Selenium is used for browser testing.
OpenSource.com: New Linux distro for digital artists
Linux Journal: Linux Gets Loud – Overview of music apps available on Linux
Bryan Alexander: I Defy The World and Go Back to RSS – Bryan describes how he return to using a RSS reader (although he describes the Digg Reader, which has shut down). I use River5 from Dave Winer with a single page app for reading my feeds.
In These Times: How Portland Occupiers Shut Down ICE