This has been the first chance I’ve gotten over the past month to write anything. I’m currently outside of my lecture room. eXtreme Programming. The methodology is based on the most important factors of programming, and turned up to the next level. Its not that there is “less” of anything (especially documentation), but there is more of the rest. It just means that the focus is more directed at its 12 practices: The planning game, on-site customer, small releases, simple design, pair programming, testing, refactoring, collective ownership, coding standards, continuous integration, 40 hour week and metaphor.
This is an agile methodology and there are plenty of arguments for and against these kind of methodologies, but of course every business has their own particular practiced methodology. In any case, the subject is more about putting the methodology into practice than actually completing the task being given.
//Round two of trying to blog – again I’m outside of my lecture room.
Uni is starting to to gain some momentum. The assignments are starting and both require meetings with clients. It is taking up a lot of my time, considering I now seem to be doing uni work all weekend.
At work I’ve been looking at web services and have been able to get a PHP version working which has a simple job “manager” (if you could call it that). The main use for it was to be able to call it from REALBasic and get back PDF images since its all generated through command line utilities. My only issue as of this afternoon was getting the pecl_http extension working for PHP and at the moment, its not obvious why its failing, but thats a major necessity since I need to POST data to the services.
One thing I am looking forward to is the REALBasic Summit in Denver, Colorado in September. I’m being sent by work and can’t wait to meet all the other REALBasic enthusiasts. Of course, there’s a 4 day stop over in San Francisco catch up on the time difference and of course, see what I missed out last time!
//Round three of trying to blog – this time at home.
With eXtreme Programming, the system is to build a simple to use, easy to see application to manage Meccano enthusiasts inventory of pieces. I ended up going to a Meccano meet on Saturday to meet the end users, all of whom are really interesting and funny guys. The models were quite impressive and has rubbed off a bit on me.
I think this semester will be quite a long one, just because of the amount of work I now have to do. The subjects are like the ordinary subjects where you leave the assignments until two days before. It’s now having to have results every week to show the client and to have regular group meetings as well as pair programming sessions. I’m finding myself catching the train a lot more to give me the extra time to work on certain tasks.
Below are a couple photos from the Meccano meet of a couple of interesting pieces – mainly the differential.
Written by Milton Lai