As long as we believe that it's possible to deterministically control the development of software, deterministic solutions will be the only ones that we can entertain. Only by letting go of the idea of determinism can we open up to other, less perfect ways of influencing the process.

Apparently Einstein went to his grave believing that "God does not play dice with the universe," that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle was wrong, and that there was just some other variable that we weren't taking into account that would explain everything.

How can we see the problems that we face when building software through new eyes?

Some studies have shown that reviews are a far cheaper and more efficient approach to error removal than testing. These studies don't suggest that reviews should replace testing, but that you are missing out on some big economic leverage if you don't use reviews.

In the fairly famous "Defense Science Board Task Force on Military Software" released in the late 1980s, recommedation 29 was to "...develop economic incentives...to allow contractors to profit from offering modules for reuse..."

One commenter on my previous blog entry suggested that, because "Jini has recently been released by Sun as an ALV2 licensed opensource system. Thus, the door has opened for a whole new wave of distributed systems revolution."

Like so many of the "this will solve all your problems" technologies of the past, CORBA came riding in on the usual fanfare of "yes, finally, this is really the one!"

The "Thinking in Java" conference was kind of a bust, sign-up wise. And I think I know why.

I came across a web site that had tried to be a magazine and was clearly having trouble. I think all attempts to simply transfer the magazine format to a web site haven't worked as expected.

As a followup to "Simplifying XML Manipulation", here is the Fedex Rate Requester that motivated me to make xmlnode in the first place. Because xmlnode got the XML-creation code noise out of the way, I was able to bash this together very quickly.

I've been having some good collaboration experiences lately with a coauthor in another state, working on a book project together.

Every time someone creates a new XML-based language, God (performs some unspeakable act).

Sometimes it seems that the true value of something in our business is inversely proportional to the hype. When programmers come up with a good idea, they don't seem very good at hyping it.

This is a series of interviews that I did a few years back, before podcasting became commonplace. My original intent was to turn them into a CD, but I had a few release issues and it got put on the back burner and forgotten for awhile.

For some time now, my intuition has been telling me that the Twisted Matrix is something that would be good to understand. Maybe it's just from seeing the kind of energy that the Twisted guys exhibit at Python conferences.