Scrum is a software development method. It’s been on my radar for a long time but mostly with a negative air to it. After I finally overcame a lot of my prejudices, I recently started to look into it seriously. And it turns out it makes a lot more sense and it’s a lot easier than I used to think. I blame the gazillions of Scrum consultancies out there for sometimes overcomplicating things. In the end it comes down to these few points: ...
local.ch bietet eine Million gratis Telefonanrufe für Schweizer KMUs. Nachdem die Schweizer Banken nun 68 Milliarden erhalten haben, will local.ch auch den Schweizer KMUs etwas schenken. local.ch zeigt wie’s geht (Disclaimer: Ich arbeite für local.ch ag)
In der NZZ musste ich gestern lesen, dass die SBB die Suprise Magazine aus den Bahnhöfen verbannt. Dies hat mich zu einer Reaktion veranlasst, das ich über das Kontaktformular der SBB gesendet habe. Sehr geehrte Damen und Herren Ich beziehe mich auf einen Bericht der NZZ, wonach sie in Zukunft den Verkauf der Surprise Magazine im Bahnhof verbieten möchten. Diesen Entscheid kann ich beim besten Willen nicht nachvollziehen. Es handelt sich hierbei um ein Projekt, welches der Integration randständiger Menschen dient. Es bietet diesen Menschen eine sinnvolle Tätigkeit und einen kleinen Zusatzerwerb. Für mich ist dieses Magazin ein Vorzeigebeispiel des humanitären Geistes der Schweiz. ...
To keep up to date on certain topics I really like to use the Delicous popular pages. For example git, python or database. All these pages also have a feed which I have been subscribed to for a long time now. Unfortunately those feeds all have a common problem: they often show the same links more than once. I’m not the first one to be disturbed by this, there used to be a service called del.icio.us filtered to tackle the problem - but that service is offline since July 2007. ...
On Friday I posted an idea about declarative web services which had been growing for a while. As luck would have it today we had a hack day at local.ch, so I got to spend a workday on that idea. I got positive feedback from my co-workers, so I have now published the skeleton on github. The project is called “servicegen” for now - no nice name has come up yet. ;-) See the README on github for information about the ideas.
I’ve been developing a lot of web services lately. I usually do this with Okapi and web.py. Somehow the tasks for creating a web service are always more or less the same. Specify URL schema Validate input parameters Request data: either from a database or from at least one other web service Identify output format using URL or HTTP headers Output data in the correct format And I think that even web.py doesn’t do a good enough job of making this easy and really fast. ...
Yesterday we’ve released version 1.0 of Okapi, a web framework built with PHP and XSLT. I’ve spent a substantial amount of time during the last months working on that release. Okapi is the framework we use at local.ch for all our frontend needs and was originally developed by Silvan from Liip. So far we used a heavily modified fork of Okapi. New projects at local now don’t use that internal fork anymore but instead the official central Okapi. To facilitate that I’ve merged some stuff from our fork into the main repository and also I’ve cleaned up the code base so that Okapi now sucks less. ...
I’m pretty programming language agnostic and fluent in a handful of different languages. That means I use the language that gets the job done. But I tend to lean towards dynamic programming languages specifically PHP, Python and Ruby. Last week I had to solve a non-trivial problem for my background: clustering of content. I had to write a program which takes a bunch of search results and clusters them together by content. So similar results would go into the same group. ...
Intel is doing a quiet time pilot with about 300 people. In that pilot they disconnect for Tuesday morning. No mails, no IM, no phones, no person allowed to walk in to the office. The pilot has launched end of August, but I only learned of it today through another story on the same blog: No Email Day (via NZZ). On Friday they now encourage not using email but instead talk directly face-to-face or use the phone. ...
In a previous article I gave an introduction to GTD. In this post I’ll describe how I actually implemented that system using the fabulous DEVONthink. DEVONthink Pro First a word of introduction. If you don’t use DEVONthink yet, I recommend you to try out specific tools like iGTD or kgtd first. They may be better suited to implementing a basic GTD system. I went with DEVONthink because all my reference material is already in there and so putting in my actions and projects into the same system makes sense. Additionally I don’t mind some custom hacking and customization which definitely is necessary with DEVONthink. ...