Agile (how not to)

In which a spleen is vented.

The following tirade is the result of years working in badly-implemented Agile environments, and the sneaking suspicion that there is no other kind. ChildSkeletonFactory In software, we like to be agile. Not literally, not in any way that involves physical movement beyond the coffee machine, but metaphorically. We like metaphors, preferably more than one at a time, and so code is full of picturesque objects like factories, dictionaries, trees, bootstraps, threads, skeletons, children, containers, watchdogs and so on.

No Man's Science

In which there are spoilers.

I complained about the arbitrary chemistry of No Man's Sky. Recently, I received an answer of sorts from the game itself.

Pedantry

In which an irrational decision is made.

Naming things is difficult. We know that. But if you get it wrong, it can taint your whole product - at least, for pedants like me. Today, I was investigating JavaScript Rest API testing frameworks. There seem to be two big names: Chakram and Frisby, or its newer fork IcedFrisby. Chakram has a less silly name. It has a nice logo. Its documentation looks slicker. It appears more mature (IcedFrisby 1.

WordArt

In which it looks as if you are trying to write a glowing orange letter.

Remember WordArt?

No Man's Bleep

In which I tell Hello Games what's what.

Just about the most anticipated computer game of last year, No Man’s Sky was notable for the algorithmically-generated galaxy in which it’s set - trillions of planets, all unique. It’s awe-inspiring. Unique creatures roam among unique plants and rocks on unique landforms, but when you land your nearly-unique starship at a rather familiar-looking trading station, the trading terminal is exactly the same as all the others.

Csound on Stack Exchange

In which Csound might just get a Q&A site.

Wouldn’t it be nice… …if there were an equivalent of Stack Overflow, the popular and tremendously useful programming question-and-answer site, for Csound? That’s what these guys are proposing. I’ve put my name to it (the 7th supporter - never let it be said I’m not an early adopter), but I’m not convinced it’s got the momentum to take off. After all, there is already Stack Overflow itself, which has all of 19 questions tagged “csound”.

Mud

In which Hugo gets a new theme, dark in colour but light in weight.

Introducing Mud, my theme for Hugo (the static site generator used to create this site). That's what it's called for the moment, at least. Because it's brown and not very clever. Let's see whether it sticks.

A first synth with Csound and Cabbage

In which Csound newbies learn to put together a little synthesizer.

What are Csound and Cabbage? Csound is a computer music composition system. It turns 30 this year (2016), which makes it a veteran in technology terms: 1986 was the year of the Nintendo Entertainment System, if that helps. It predates the 486 processor, the World Wide Web, Linux, SMS, Java, and mobile phones smaller than a brick. But Csound has continued to evolve, and is still in active development and use.