Programming and Project Management Links for April 16, 2009

danieltenner.com – Dealing with impossible crises – Absolutely terrific advice for participating in group problem solving (something that many have trouble with).

The Buzz Bin – The Cultural Challenge to Integration – about breaking down silo walls.

Beth’s Blog – Silos Culture Inside the Walls of Nonprofits Prevent Effective Social Media Use – yep – they exist in non-profits as well.

Lessons Learned: Five Whys – great technique to drill down to root causes.

scottberkun.com – Top ten reasons managers become great

Matt Jones: Data as Seductive Material

Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth

Artima: What I learned at Java Posse Roundup ’09 – some good advice here.

Netbeans.org: NetBeans Platform – some nice inspiration here among those using the Netbeans platform.

Hacker News: Ask HN: Is it worth a back-end developer’s time to get into web-design and HTML/CSS (yes!)

WikiWikiWeb: Specialization Is For Insects

Computerworld: Researchers: Databases still beat Google’s MapReduce

SmoothSpan Blog: AmazonFail Shows Data Matters Too

imagine27: 2009-04-09 live lisp art opengl synth sound – wow – slow build – but that’s part of why its worth it.

grok2.com: quoting Fred Brooks – Why is programming fun?

SEOmoz: How Google’s Rankings Algorithm Has Changed Over Time

Bb RealTech: My Abbreviated Self – thoughts on the evolving HTML5 spec.

CSSquirrel: Comic Update: Madness? This is HTML5!

rc3.org: Do what you can’t not do:

So my suggestion would be find a way to get paid to do the thing you can’t stop yourself from doing. The best programmers are people who can’t stop programming. The best writers are people who find themselves wanting to write when they’re doing other things. Do what comes naturally.

btw – I’m posting regular links at del.icio.us again – here’s my programming link stream.

The story in Detroit resembels the story in (some) Philadelphia neighborhoods

Amid industrial devastation and abandonment, low prices, infrastructure, and urban settings are luring new home owners willing to take a chance.

That’s the story of Fishtown, Port Richmond, Frankford, and parts of West Philly in Philadelphia.

According to the NYTimes, that’s the story of Detroit as well.

Here’s to reinvention and believing that when we live together, we are more likely to have enriched lives than when we live far apart.

Related:

Boing Boing: Haunting photo-essay on rotting buildings in Detroit

Boing Boing: Detroit and the future of America

Programming links for Sunday, March 15h, 2008

YouTube: Google Tech Talk: Linus Torvalds on git

code zen: On Technology, User Experience and the need for Creative Technologists

Joel Spolsky: How to be a program manager

Explanations to common Java exceptions – who said Java programmers didn’t have a sense of humor.

IndexOutOfBoundsException – You have put your index finger in an unacceptable place. Reposition it and try again.

Okay, maybe not.

Emacs links for today

Emacs Screencast (Ruby developer shows why he likes Emacs)

Xah’s Emacs Lisp Tutorial – I’m following this myself. Some great bits in there for the Lisp/Emacs newbie.

Publiushing Org-mode files to HTML – nice setup to publish a directory of org-mode files.

Hacker News thread: Ask HN: Emacs users on OS X, what’s your setup?

Aaron’s daughter learns about project scope

And a little Flash to boot 🙂

Flash sounds like a perfect tool to teach programming. Others I’ve been reading about:

Alice

Scratch (scratch is built on Squeak Smalltalk – there are other educational environments/tools built with it as well)

Snake Wrangling for Kids

Pygame

My roots: LOGO and Commodore BASIC.

Interesting related article at O’Reilly: Why Johnny Can’t Program.