I’ve been experimenting with creating an ActivityPub test suite for two of the three conformance specification profiles in the ActivityPub (AP) specification: ActivityPub conformant Server (server-side of client-to-server specification) and ActivityPub conformant Federated Server (server-to-server). As I run this test suite on various servers it’s appearing to me that (probably) no server is compliant with … Read more
I’ve created an unofficial version of an ActivityPub OWL ontology for experimentation and exploration purposes. It’s based on an old Activity Streams ontology that was abandoned in favor of JSON-LD in ActivityPub. I also created a separate ontology for Mastodon (toot) extensions. The ontology is represented in the RDF Turtle format. It can be viewed and browsed in tools like Protégé. You can find the … Read more
XP Values, Principles and Practices Adapting Extreme Programming (XP) for your local environment can be risky and challenging. To do this correctly, you must remain aware of the XP values and principles to avoid trouble. I’ve seen recent discussions in various forums about the meaning of XP values and principles. Here are my current working … Read more
It’s been 11 years since I wrote about the notion of being “Agile” without a name. My feelings about the topic haven’t changed since then. I still believe it’s more important to be an effective software developer than one that has been labeled “agile” according to some specific agile methodology. The Agile Manifesto suggests valuing “Individuals and interactions over processes … Read more
I recently had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion at the O’Reilly Money:Tech conference. We discussed the extent that the financial technology community had embraced open source. Other members of the panel were Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, James Altucher who founded StockPickr, and Graham Miller of Marketcetera. I was representing free financial open-source software developers in … Read more
The global collaboration perspective on software development is a stark contrast to the preference for face-to-face communication during development activities.Steve Bate · February 10th, 20182 min read You should expect to see developers putting on headsets when they start up their development tools – to listen and respond to the voice over IP (VOIP) chatter from peers … Read more
There was an interesting discussion during the Agile Toolkit Podcast interview with Dave of the Pragmatic Programmers. I’ve transcribed a few of the comments about agile methodologies below. Dave Thomas: I think agile methodologies have adopted their own venom. And to that extent, I’m pulling back, away from, the individual agile methodologies. I believe very, very strongly in agility. … Read more
QCon 2007 was a great opportunity to hear the architects of some of the largest Internet sites discuss the challenges they’ve had. One particularly interesting challenge was discussed by Dan Pritchett, Technical Fellow at eBay, Inc. He spoke about the challenges of providing enough power and air conditioning to eBay’s data centers. I’m not sure how accurate … Read more
Trail Ridge Consulting has released the results of an agile project management tooling survey performed in late 2006. Apparently, APM tools are being widely used by both small and large organizations although the primary reasons differ with the size of the organization. It was interesting to me to see that card-based approaches are used less often than dedicated APM … Read more
In a recent article I wrote about preferring Effective Software Development (ESD). I prefer being effective over being labeled as “agile” (whatever that might mean to you personally). This preference raises many questions for me. How do I define effectiveness? How do I know if I’m being effective or not? How can I become more effective? Is … Read more