Challenging software development blogs

I am not hugely keen on top 100 lists or similar trite listings of people, blogs or posts, however sometimes I notice that I have too many tabs open in Chrome (hello, 58?!) and need to itemise some of them. Many of the ones I keep open are blogs that challenge me enough that I want to read them frequently (I know ... I should be using an RSS reader, so call me old-school! ;).

I think these are some of the more challenging blogs* out there with regards to software development - read these and you will find your brain, assumptions and dealer-held beliefs under high-voltage attack.

* OK, so I am going to miss a couple of fantastic ones - what is important is that you check out the ones I do mention!

Joel on Software (visit)

Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software and Stack Overflow fame has had one of the most well-read and discussed software development blogs on the planet for years now. He is an original thinker in a market filled with duplicates, he also has a deep commitment to giving his developers great office space.

The Software Simplist (visit)

Udi Dahan's blog specialises in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), but I read him for his refreshing view of domain-driven design (DDD). I got a new insight into DDD from his DDD & Many to Many Object Relational Mapping post.

Scott Bellware's Blog (visit)

Scott Bellware is probably the most hated/respected .NET rebel on the planet. His abrasive manner and obvious chip on his shoulder with Microsoft and the ALT.NET mainstream put some people off, but he has a deep insight into what Agile development is meant to be all about and a straightforward manner in sharing what he knows. He also seems pretty sure that most developers are learning impaired. A good example of his (more positive) thinking is Productivity: It Comes from Software Design Rather than Software Tools.

Noop.nl (visit)

Jurgen Appelo's software development management blog has some of the most pragmatic and interesting advice available for functional managers of developers. His company's situation is similar to Elcom's, so I appreciate his honest and smart insight into how to make Scrum work with large teams working on many disparate projects. He has useful posts like How to Handle Many Simultaneous Projects which apply Lean/Scrum principles to the real world of custom software development.

You'd think with all my video game experience that I'd be more prepared for this (visit)

Jason Yip from ThoughtWorks focuses his blog on lean manufacturing principles and how they apply to the reality of software development. A challenging thinker and opinionated professional, he manages to stay as radical as someone like Scott Bellware with a more pleasant demeanour. A typical (longer) post from him would be No matter how many times you say it, we still don't need a QA on the team.

Greg Young's Blog (visit)

Greg Young is a Microsoft MVP who has some very interesting opinions on domain-driven design, namely that the domain model is only there for write operations. Check out his DDDD: Master-Detail Question post for more details on this and how he uses a thin DTO layer to power his read-only UI pages.

Chad Myers' Blog (visit)

I first found out about Chad from a talk he and Jeremy Miller gave on Opinionated MVC (see videos here and here). Jeremy Miller developed StructureMap, which is a Dependency Injection/Inversion of Control framework. Chad is also the driving force behind the Virtual ALT.NET (VAN) group which has helped developers connect from places as far afield as Texas and Australia!

James Bach's Blog (visit)

Interested in software testing? Then you need to quickly head over to James Bach's blog and check out his controversial, but smart and honest posts on the topic. To understand where he is coming from, check out his Schools of Testing ... Here to Stay blog post.

So ...

Who did I miss? Leave a comment and let me know!

Apparently I'm in marketing now

There's an ongoing joke in the dev team at Elcom that I'm actually a sales guy, due to the number of sales meetings I've been doing recently. Well apparently I'm in marketing too, because this blog just appeared in the inaugural Top 50 Australian Marketing Pioneer Blogs list, compiled by Julian Cole and to be published in the August edition of Marketing Magazine.

I am honoured to be in that list (at #33) as a large part of what I do is thinking about how IT products or services can offer better value to customers, including innovating beyond the current market space - which is certainly included in the Wikipedia definition of marketing.

Having said that, you might have to look hard to find anything specific to marketing on this blog. So for anyone who has just come from the Top 50 list, here's a summary of my posts that might be interesting from a marketing viewpoint (especially if your product includes software):

• Om's got the wrong business model for Twitter
• How aware are you?
• Feeling secure or not ...
• Rewarding failure
• Cost Accounting, Lean Manufacturing and the Craftsman Within
• Google Gears
• Norton 360: Should we tell him?
• Shape of the world
• YouTube suckers Google? Or gets swallowed?
• Innovation more diffuse than we think
• Not forgetting Enterprise 2.0 ...
• SaaS is letting me down
• Dell's Got a Blog!
• Long Tail Wisdom
• Success/Failure Web 2.0 Style
• Falkayn's List of Web 2.0 Lists
• Thomas Nelson's Corporate Blogging Guidelines
• Software Building Angst

A big shout out to Alan J Lee!

A big shout out to my compadre Alan J Lee , who has just entered the world of blogging. One of his first posts is about a Silverlight presentation we had yesterday from Microsoft Developer Evangelist Michael Kordahi.

Keep on blogging Alan!

Sydney weblogger April meetup

Thanks to Meetup.com I got a chance to meet a bunch of other Sydney bloggers last night. It was great fun and very interesting to meet other people with blogs, some of them very popular.


Of course you have to tread carefully when it comes to topics of conversation, as bloggers we are naturally opinionated and can find things to disagree about (politics, science, religion etc) pretty easily. However there was a surprisingly strong commonality when it came to reading sci-fi and fantasy - so that helped bring us together.

Funnily enough blogging itself was one of the least interesting topics - perhaps because we all do it so much - but it was nice to be able to share a laugh about waiting up for partners to come to bed because they are still blogging! The event was organised by Sara the Bargain Queen who does a great job of getting everyone together. Thanks Sara!

Google Docs & Spreadsheets

I re-discovered Google Docs & Spreadsheets today, and realised that I can post from it to my Blogger blogs. It can even include images such as the one below.

In fact this post was written as a Google document. The spreadsheet function leaves a lot to be desired, but then I'm a fairly expert user of Excel and include a lot of conditional formatting, complex formulas and macros in my spreadsheets. The ability to edit text documents from anywhere on the web is a nice feature and one I will be using more now it allows me to post to my blogs directly.

Blogger gets a facelift!

Well, I may need to eat my words about Blogger's gluggy feature set, because there is a new version of Blogger in Beta (ahhh ... how Web 2.0 of them). Straight from the horse's mouth:

“Today we're launching a new version of Blogger in beta! You've been asking for ways to do more with your blog, and you can with this new release.”

If you want to see it in action, you simply need to go to http://beta.blogger.com/. Anyone can create a new blog on the beta service, although you will need a Google account to do so - also, the blogs are still hosted on blogspot.com, so you get the usual scarcity of good names.

Key differences include:

• Post labels (Google's name for tags)
• UI improvements, especially on the dashboard
• A move to "Layouts" instead of "Templates"
• Database driven pages, rather than static ones manually re-published*

* Whilst this is a great way of removing the horrid wait for something to publish on your blog, it does not help performance. I hope that Google have been looking to “design their on-demand systems for peak load, not average load” (as per Dave Stephens' suggestion).

Most of the new stuff is laid out in the new features tour, as well as screenshots and descriptions at the Google Operating System blog.

Iranian SharePoint Blogger

Farvashan is a blogger from Iran, he recently started an English SharePoint blog on sharepointblogs.com. His English is a lot better than my Farsi, but still requires slow reading to get his meaning. However he's keeping up with the latest changes in Microsoft's SharePoint technologies and has an interesting POV operating within the economic and political restrictions in Iran.

“We have two big simultaneous issues, about developing software and designing IT systems, in my country.

One of them our main policy from the government about working based on the open source technologies, because unfortunately no direct contact with the US government.

The other is bad integration of open source technologies, with the other great Microsoft technologies, especially side of users and clients. As you know in the small to midrange business it’s almost impossible developing systems without using the Microsoft technologies.

We must always choose a trade off between them; I think for the small to midrange business needs we have no other choice but Microsoft technologies.”

Dell's Got a Blog!

Well, well, it looks like Dell finally worked out that they ought to be using the web to talk to their users and have started a blog called One 2 One. Of course I only found it because Scoble's talking about it.

Hint for corporate marketing types - don't bother launching a blog if you can't get important bloggers in your industry to mention you. I guess the Hit mentality is still there in the blogging world.

Perhaps just as important, you must allow your staff to make mistakes whilst communicating with customers on the blog. They must be able to attempt to have open, honest and human communication with customers, otherwise it's just another one-way information pipe (oh yeah, Scoble talks about that too).

Great SharePoint Blogs

There are a number of great SharePoint bloggers around. As I am leaving my current workplace, I won't have access to the SharePoint sites we had created to track these bloggers' efforts. So for my own sake (and perhaps your interest) I'll list some of the better ones here.

Blogs
Jan Tielens' Bloggings
.Net, InfoPath, BizTalk, Web Services and SharePoint - good stuff with relevant screenshots. Notable additions include:
* Workflow Lite for SharePoint
* SmartPart for SharePoint (enables GUI design for web parts)

Bryant Likes's Blog
Has developed a set of SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services web parts.

Tim Heuer's Blog
Great web part guru, offers lots of stuff for free, the best of which is his free RSS feed reader.

Patrick Tisseghem's Blog
A .Net developer who covers a lot of stuff on building web parts, using InfoPath and general .Net.

Sig Weber's Playground (aka. "Extreme SharePoint'ing" or: doing more with less)
A .Net developer doing lots of stuff with SharePoint, Exchange, IE, Outlook, Office and Windows - especially 2003 editions of those. BTW, his site runs on WSS.

Stramit's SharePoint Blog
SPS and WSS material. He has done a GUI tool for the smigrate.exe tool called GuiSMigrate and another for the spin.exe (document import tool) called GuiSpin.

Mike Walsh's WSS Blog

Some useful material, but he seems to concentrate mainly on his WSS FAQ.

FAQs
Some particularly good FAQ sites exists as well:

Windows Sharepoint Services FAQ
Mike Walsh's WSS FAQ site, and one of the largest. Can be confusing to find what you want, but is generally a good starting point.

WSS Demo Site (developer FAQ)
Ian Morrish's WSS demo site, has lots of articles on development, tracks the latest SharePoint KB articles from Microsoft, etc.

SharePoint Portal Server FAQ
Great FAQ for anyone using SPS (2001 or 2003).

Communique from the Iraqi Front

Here's an interesting Communique from the Iraqi Front. Nice to see they're morale's up. I probably don't agree with every sentiment expressed here, but it's hard to not like these guys.