Software development as a cooperative game http://alistair.cockburn.us/Cooperative+game+manifesto+for+software+development This quote got me thinking today, because if it really is a cooperative game and teams are how we structure people working to solve problems, shouldn’t we look towards other team activities for inspiration? When you work as a team, it is important to have diversity and a mixed set of skills. Especially in software development cross-functional teams is something that can be a good thing.

The world is yours, and everything in it Scarface I attended a great community conference in Bergen called Booster conf. They have a lot of students helping out as volunteers, which is a really great thing. Providing them with an insight into our industry is something that is really cool. During the conference there are a series of Open Spaces and today I did something I’ve been thinking of doing for a while.

Just because you’ve seen a lot of porn doesn’t mean you know how to make love Me Too many coders and product developers think they know something about Ux or graphic design just because they’ve seen a lot of it. This is naturally just plain false. All you’ve got is the same skills as a parrot who speaks. You can repeat what has been already told you. However you can not create something original.

I’ve come to realize, however, that while technology may make it more convenient to communicate, it doesn’t improve our ability to get a point across This is a quote from John Maeda’s book Redesigning Leadership. I think it captures the essence of the problem we have today with communication. We have all these amazing tools which enables just about anyone to potentially communicate with millions of people around the globe.

Our list of demands I am working on a rewrite of the web tier at work. We’ve set this up as a “dugnad” where we do a section at a time with the team responsible for that part of our service. This effort is called the Strap-on Project and each section should take max 3 weeks (which is our release cycle). When we bring in people (max 2) we have a list of demands in order to make things work:

In Silicon Valley you’d quit and start a competitor I was bitching about something I thought we where doing at my gig which was in my opinion stupid. The quote is what Luke Wroblewski said would be the customary thing to to do in the Valley. He also said that staying in a job for more than two years means you lack initiative and you’re basically someone you wouldn’t hire.

what’s in a name? In my experience pretty much everything is in the name when it comes to the art of programming. If you start out with bad naming and a structure which does not communicate any of your intentions with writing the code you will end up having problems. Either understanding it yourself or having anyone else make sense of your code. When I do code reviews I often only get to this part.

A pragmatic approach means taking your surroundings into account when creating new buildings I watched this program about an architecture collective in Denmark called Adept (or something). They had “a pragmatic approach” towards architecture. What they meant was that if you where to build a new house in the midst of some ugly piece of urban sprawl you shouldn’t design something totally spaced out, but instead realize that the ugliness around you is going to be there for a while and you should take it into consideration in your project.

I just wanted to repeat my thanks for inviting me to Web Rebels. It was a fantastic event and was easily my favorite conference to have spoken at this year The first ever Web Rebels conference is over and it was absolutely fucking amazing. Everything went as we’d hoped and Oslo was so kind as to present itself at it’s finest. I loved every minute of organizing this event. The attendees and speakers where inspiring, funny, kind and just amazing people.