David Seruyange's Radio Weblog

Tuesday, October 22, 2002

Weblog update! I figured out how to route my posts into different 'categories' with Userland. This should keep my content a bit more organized and allow the technical readers to avoid personal content and non-techie friends to read my 'prattle' section for updates. I also have a section exclusively for books. I'll expand the different categories as time goes on.
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Alan Cooper Interview.
Visual Studio Magazine has an interview with Alan Cooper. An excellent read, Alan talks about the differences between engineers vs. craftsmen, the role of software architects, XP vs. RUP, and his opinions of the .NET platform. Highly quotable:

The role of architects: "Architects synthesize people, purpose, and technology. If you just take people and technology, you have art—entertainment. If you just take technology and purpose, it's engineering. And people and purpose without technology is psychology."
On complexity & components: "Software construction has often resembled digging the Panama Canal with a teaspoon. You can make the walls of the canal perfectly straight, but it takes forever."
How .NET provides portability: "... by providing cleavage planes. It's like cutting a diamond. You can't just cut one; you search for the natural cleavage planes in the diamond's crystalline structure. Likewise, you have to find the cleavage planes in the software and break it in two. Those cleavage planes, of course, are APIs and the CLR."
On competition: "A Microsoft API such as the CLR allows an opening for other language vendors, as does offering Web services through XML. It means the days of getting all your services from one vendor—or even a single app—are numbered."
[Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog]
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Well, a few interesting things happened today. The friends I had sent the rough draft of my article wrote back and were encouraging. I put together an outline and sent it off to a couple of publishers. [send good vibes!].

Other than that, today had some interesting finds. For a person like myself who is engrossed in books, check out The Agony Column. There are quite a few reviews to keep you busy for a while. Someone should help the author Rick Kleffel make the site dynamic (ie database driven) - I like the information architecture but he seems to be hardcoding it all. Ouch! I added it to the linkfolio though...

Elizabeth Spiers writes a good blog - she also reads and comments on Christopher Hitchens, much better than I do. The blog is centered on current events and journalism as far as I can tell. It's also a good launching point if you read blogs - her blogroll is huge.

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