Eric Armstrong's recent article on Artima caught my eye and made me think a bit about the evolution of distributed programming techniques. In the beginning, there was the message. But what now?

This is my last blog from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

This is the third of a set of blogs from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

This is the second of a set of blogs from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

This is the first of a set of blogs made from the Seventh Jini Community Meeting held in Cambridge, Massachusetts March 23-25, 2004.

If you read Computer Science text books you might imagine external program documentation actually exists. Yet, when I asked many of my colleagues if they had ever had such documentation throughout a project's life cycle, they laughed a bit uncomfortably and said, "well, no, not really." What's going on here?

Guerrilla Development is software development in an environment unsupportive of the effort. In my first few essays I discussed some of the problems software departments might have in their interactions with the rest of the company. In this one, I talk a bit about UML and my concerns for its future.

Small companies struggle to get their first product out the door. That's probably no surprise. But, the next hurdle may be even more difficult: getting the second product, the next generation product, out the door. The problems are not necessarily technical -- but they can be deadly for a young company nonetheless.

Read most any software engineering text book and you'll be told that requirements gathering is key to successful projects. Yet, many projects in start-up companies never develop such a document or, perhaps worse, have useless, sketchy documents that serve only political needs. What's going on here?

I've spent most of my career in small companies, usually start-ups, doing software development under less than optimal conditions. I've got 15 or 20 years worth of (hopefully instructive) horror stories aching for an outlet. This is my first installment.