Programming

Never underestimate what you can do in excel.

A hobbyist has created a 16-bit CPU that was built and runs inside Excel at a 3Hz clock rate and has 128KB of RAM, a 16-color 128x128 pixel display, and a custom assembly language that all runs in the popular spreadsheet. In fact, you can even try out the CPU with files the creator has made available via Github. 

It's a bit of an older article, but in particular, I loved the highlight on the loss of focus on delivering value toward how to make estimates better. Our job as devs is not to be the best estimators, but to be able to deliver business value quickly and consistently.

To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly. Story cost estimation doesn’t help much with that, if at all.

So if the existence of an estimate causes management to take their eye off the ball of value and instead focus on improving estimates, it takes attention from the central purpose, which is to deliver real value quickly.

This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided.

It's always great to see how someone approaches their craft. We expect to see code in this day of easy to view, public repos, but it's even cooler that old source is being made available. Wonderful to see techniques used in these very memory and CPU constrained devices.

Last Sunday, the Commodore 64/128 Programming Facebook group was carrying on its business as usual when received an invaluable gift from Michael Archer – the source code of many Commodore 64 games he programmed between 1986-1992.

My company uses COBOL. While it's easy to write a click bait headline like the one above, it's much harder to actually replace or even replicate a lot of what COBOL and the systems that rely on it.

The third option, however, is the cheapest and probably easiest. Instead of trying to completely revamp the entire system, Döderlein suggests that banks take a closer look at the current consumer problems.

Big trip back in time.  I've got some pages I built from the mid nineties sitting around on my hard drive as well as the copy of "The Complete Idiots Guide to JavaScript" which I learned some basics on back in 1997. I think my biggest memory of this time period was doing an extremely complex site layout in tables and when modifications came into the layout spending a good hour or two reworking how the table was all set up.

Aspirant developers are told they have to learn HAML, LESS, CoffeeScript, React and whatever else fly-by-night bullshit Hacker News is spruiking. Honestly, I don’t care. I’ve tuned out at this point, and I’m not alone.

Which is why I love Glitch, from Fog Creek. We’ve written about this site before. Essentially, it’s a playground where you can remix other people’s code in a safe and self-contained environment.

Fascinating digital archeology and commentary on one of the standards I work with quite often.

Pretty great to look through the git repo. Take a look at the code through the lens of today's conventions. Working in a constrained environment myself (though nothing like these guys) is a great motivator for finding interesting ways of doing things, while still injecting some fun.

The code and its comments has lots of in jokes: an injunction to the astronaut to "crank the silly thing around"; a file called "PINBALL_GAME_BUTTONS_AND_LIGHTS.s"; a subroutine called "BURN_BABY_BURN--MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE.agc" and a comment about "TRASHY LITTLE SUBROUTINES" -- and, of course, some Shakespeare ("IT WILL BE PROVED TO THY FACE THAT THOU HAST MEN ABOUT THEE THAT/USUALLY TALK OF A NOUN AND A VERB, AND SUCH ABOMINABLE WORDS AS NO/CHRISTIAN EAR CAN ENDURE TO HEAR.").

Nice overview of our project.  I'll always put quotes of myself:

"There has always been a need to deliver value to passengers, and this is a way to further enhance the experience," Craddock says.

And my co project leads, Hillary:

The Drupal development platform was a key to building the system, says co-project lead Hillary Neaf. The company began using the open-source framework in 2007 to develop its corporate Internet framework. "It provides a high level of flexibility and the level of security we required," she explains. "We have also benefited from the community support, and have used a lot of the Drupal forum and group input to develop the initiative."

And Subbu

"Princess@Sea delivers digital transformation in a disconnected environment," says co-project lead Subbu Hariharan. "It's an exciting and challenging proposition."