On Distributed Development

 So, I have been doing distributed development at Bang the Table, for the past year. It’s a company with a very strong work from home culture. We even had a virtual birthday party for one of our directors over Skype video chat –

Birthday party at Bang the Table

Telecommuting / working remotely / working from home – these are various terms for an increasingly popular mode of working. In this model (of working) people use the amazing ability of the internet to communicate over vast distances instantly and modern collaborative software tools to effectively work together without actually being in the same physical room, office or even city.

There are some pretty powerful advantages to such an arrangement –

1. No need for any commuting, one can stay close to one’s family (a huge factor if you have children) and flexible working hours. It is a more relaxed way to work. I have been working in such an environment for about a year now, and with a new baby, the lack of commute and the freedom to pop downstairs and help out in case my wife needs an extra pair of hands has been awesome!
2. Another major advantage (at least for the company), is the reduced office infrastructure costs. In places where getting an office building thats a reasonably close to where your employees live is difficult, this can be a major boon. Also, not forcing your employees into having to commute is a major plus both for employee morale and the environment.
3. One has the opportunity to hire and work with people from a larger pool rather than being limited by a single geographical location, like a city or state or even a country. This can be very powerful advantage, sometimes finding all the right people you need in a single location can be a major problem.
4. An “advantage” that is often touted is that the geographical separation allows for better efficiency, since, theoretically, one could have employees coming online and starting their workday as others end theirs – making use of the entire 24 hours on the clock for work. I believe, at least for software development, this is a fallacy and attempts to leverage this so called “advantage” is a big reason for the failure of certain companies to successfully leverage this model of working – but more on this later…

In the software development field we have been working in such a distributed model for a long while now and I have seen this model evolve, influenced both by the advances in the technology and tools available for collaboration as well as the evolution of the software development methodology itself. I’d like to take a few lines to write about this evolution and distinguish between what I consider to be “distributed development” model and what I call “outsourced development”.

Image via Wikipedia

In the outsourced development model  – a software project is broken up into separate well defined phases, each phase having definite outcomes with concrete artifacts (usually in the form of documents). This means that (in theory) one can easily move around parts of a project between various teams who would then rely on the artifacts produced in the previous phase to execute the next phase of the project. Other than a short period between phases, where one team handed over the project to the other, there would be very little actual interaction between teams. This form of software development follows the waterfall methodology and while it is a good fit for outsourcing, it is, in practice, prone to problems, that, for the most part arise due to a lack of communication between the various stakeholders of the project and the members of the team(s).

What I call “distributed development” (there is a more generic definition on wikipedia that is not limited to software development) is a refinement on the outsourced development approach that attempts to leverage technological advances in internet connectivity and better communication tools to try and minimise the disconnect introduced by working remotely in software teams. Distributed development places emphasis on communication and interaction between all the members in the virtual team. The idea is to reduce the feeling that we are working in different physical spaces and that everyone is off working on some discrete task on their own. This kind of thinking is in-line with the agile philosophy which emphasizes individuals and interactions over processes and tools.

At Bang the Table, we get pretty close to what I consider to be an ideal distributed development model and I’ve come up with a few guidelines are a result of my experiences working here and from what I learned listening to a Hanselminutes podcast about working remotely –

1. One can use many tools and technologies to do your job. But regardless of what you use, patience and trust are the biggest success factors in this kind of working. I initially put this point lower down in the list but on consideration decided that this is the most important tip. Without trust the whole thing is an exercise in futility. One needs to learn to trust in the skills of the developer to do his or her bit and the patience to listen and accept that problems and delays might happen. The best way to build trust is by having open and rich channels of communication and meeting and interacting with everyone in person.
2. Reliable and fast internet is an absolute must and its not that easy to get – at least where I come from. Ask if the person you are working has a backup power supply and a good internet connection. In terms of power supply, the need for one depends a lot on the place the person is working from – if it’s a big city then usually a UPS that provides an hour of backup should be fine, unless there is chronic power problem. In smaller towns and such, they might need to have something more substantial like an inverter or a portable generator.  Modern laptops with their longer battery life and portability are a major help since they allow one to ignore smaller outages and coupled with the appropriate wireless or cellular data connection can even allow you to simply shift your base of operations to other places with power and internet.
3. This guideline, I think is going to be a bit controversial and is the reason I think that 24 hours work day idea I have mentioned is not really a good idea. If you have a team that spans countries and (in my case) continents, it is very important to have good overlap between your timezones – at least 4 hours of overlap is needed in my opinion, since this will allow you to actually collaborate rather than be limited to a short meeting at the beginning or end of your day. After all, developing software in a team is, in my experience, a collaborative activity, requiring lots of discussion (and argument)  and having your stakeholder at hand while you work through a problem is very useful. No amount of documentation and pretty pictures can substitute someone  being there, clarifying and providing context for you.
4. You need to have an open channel of communication during the time of overlap while you are working – this can be as simple as an open IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. We use Skype at work and I think the ability to call or video chat on demand make it far superior to IRC. Another option to explore is to use something like a Google+ Hangout while you are working – obviously this will mean the both you need to have reliable high bandwidth internet. Paid options for software tools are there as well like Microsoft Lync which may be a more integrated solution if you have a Microsoft based IT infrastructure with Microsoft Exchange (I got this from the podcast – haven’t used this myself since we don’t use MS Exchange). There are variety of communicators and tools out there to tryout – have a look at this link where Scott provides a deep dive into the communications tools available for remote workers.
5. Schedule regular meetings and get togethers in the real world. If this means that someone needs to travel somewhere from time to time, consider that the cost of doing distributed development. I would consider this an investment in the team’s productivity and efficiency. When everyone has met in person and worked together on issues, you build up mutual trust and respect. In my year of working at Bang the Table,  I think we have had get togethers at least once every quarter. Sometimes we just got together and spent a few days simply working together with no other agenda, sometimes it was a conference or a training.
6. Distributed development tends to work well with relatively flat and simple organizational structure. The idea is that everyone should feel equally invested and responsible for the software project. The challenge of course is that this particular setup does not scale very well and can be problematic for large organizations.
7. A good online project management tool is a must to ensure you are heading in the right direction. We are constantly trying out new tools for this part of our development. I have found JIRA to be good for support and task based work while, I am liking Trello for more open ended new development.
8. At work we use a Rackspace server as a development server and for testing. This is a machine on which we stage our commits from our local machines and have our testing done on. Having a machine to deploy your code on also forces you to test it in the right environment and also brings deployment considerations into your design and development schedule.

It’s been a fascinating experience for me – working from home and I think I have learnt a lot about the vagaries of distributed development. In fact, I have been experimenting with a more distributed approach to pair programming with a couple of friends of mine.

We used Vim in a GNU Screen session to set up a development environment that we could share between us and then while one person typed we used Skype to chat with each other. We followed the classic test driven mechanic – one person writes a test and the next person passes the test cycle. The experience was remarkably powerful, since I could see when the editor was being manipulated by the other person, the thought process going on as the code was being typed in. We built a small Python program – I came from that experience with a real appreciation of what can be done with some of the simple (and powerful) unix tools already out there.

I came across another tool Tmux which is similar to screen and is used a lot in the Mac when I was listening to this podcast on the Changelog. There is a very nice screencast showing how to use Tmux I found recently, you can checkout.  I also came across this awesome website called pair.io that spins up a server for you to use in your pair programming sessions.

Related articles

• Hanselman Blog – Remote Work
• Hanselminutes – The Plight of the Remote Worker with Pete Brown
• The Changelog – Tmux with Brian Hogan and Josh Clayton
• Pair Programming with Tmux – a screencast
• Bang the Table
• On working remotely
• Wemux – Tmux enhancement for remote pairing

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Open source writing using Git

Of late I have noticed a trend – writers, especially technical writers, are embracing the software development process and incorporating it into their writing process. There’s a great podcast about this on Herding Code where some technical writers talk about this trend.

Writers are embracing the agile philosophy of software development, one of the core tenets of this is to publish often and get feedback so you can improve/adjust. Authors are posting the content for their book projects online to get feedback – to the extent that publishers like Manning and O’Reilly offer programs that let people access to the book content as soon as the author creates it, for a discounted amount. The pioneers of this practice were the Pragmatic Programmers who offer “beta” versions of their books to customers at discounted prices. The idea behind this of course is that it lets authors get valuable feedback as to what is important, what to focus on. It also provides, authors with an incentive to keep from procrastinating about their writing.

Another major aspect of this trend is the embrace of source control in the writing process. I think this is a great development, and it makes a lot of sense if you think about it.  The book writing process, like software development, is subject to a lot of chopping and changing as the book evolves. Also writing collaboratively on something is I imagine similar to writing code in a team and probably have the same issues –  one needs ways for multiple people to be able to work on the same document without worrying if they are overwriting someone else’s hard work. Finally, a version control provides you with a fine-grained backup that allows you to rewind and replay the evolution of the book, which should be invaluable during the editing process. If there is a conflict somewhere, version control also offers tools to detect and fix it in a safe manner.

Some authors have posted their content on Github, which I think is an awesome idea.    Leveraging, the capabilities of a version control, especially a powerful and distributed one like Git and Github, is well suited for writing projects. Authors can leverage the tools  and capabilities of Github  –

• On Github, feedback can easily be provided in the form of  commit notes, line notes, issues – heck you can even fork the project make the corrections and submit a pull request back to the author.
• You can use Git as a fine grained distributed backup for your writing project that allows you to rollback specific portions of you project independently.
• You can use the social features of Github to collaborate on the project and even drum up interest by distributing the link online.
• You can maintain your code samples and other resources separately from your content and correct and upgrade them as needed. This can be very useful if the book is about specific technical frameworks that get upgraded after the book is completed and published.
• Github even has a basic editor so you can work on your project online

While browsing through Github for examples of books that use Github as a version control system for writers – I came across this tool which is  in my mind a good first step, but I think there is a lot more that we can do to improve this experience. There are a whole lot of tools being built around this concept which is quite encouraging.

Writing and programming, have a lot in common. Both involve text, both are creative activities and both are ways to express ideas (one to a machine and the other to an audience) . There is scope for a lot of cross pollination of ideas between these fields. I think, currently the main challenge is a lack of knowledge and a fear of the technical nature of a tool like Git.

Related links

• Git Scribe
• On writing technical books
• Arcturo ebooks on Github
• Mordern Perl book on Github
• Backbone fundamentals on Github
• Node Beginner on Github

A Ruby on Rails glossary.

So it’s been about a year since I started working on the Ruby language in the context of the Rails framework. It’s been awesome,  the combination of Ruby’s developer friendly language style and the incredible productivity of the Rails framework makes this a killer framework for web applications. Building the basic code is simply a matter of typing in some commands that generate all the scaffolding of code needed for a basic website. The rest is usually a matter of tweaking and adding to the generated scaffold.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

Like every web technology the Ruby on Rails framework has its own set of idioms, that one needs to get familiar with and since I am new to Ruby, for me this includes some Ruby idioms as well. I saw a post today that lists a glossary of Rails terms and I thought I’d do my own. So here goes –

1. Application Servers – Thin, Mongrel, Passenger, Unicorn, Pow – These are application servers that run the Ruby web application and respond to the requests. They are generally integrated with a web-server like Apache or Nginx, though Mongrel is technically capable of running on its own as a web-server (though since it is not multi-threaded this configuration is not useful for anything except for very light loads or on a development machine).
2. Active Record – Active record is the ORM tool used in the Rails framework to abstract the database handling. It is an implementation of the active record architectural pattern described by Martin Fowler thus – “An object that wraps a row in a database table or view, encapsulates the database access, and adds domain logic on that data.” The Active Record code is available as a separate gem that is downloaded as a dependency to Rails.
3. Active Resource – A simple way to think of active resource is that it’s like active record but for REST based web-services. Active record provides a wrapper around REST actions providing a transparent proxy between a business entity and REST based web-services.
4. Active Support – This is a set of utility classes and standard library extensions that are useful in Rails application development. It includes classes for dealing with caching, dates, time zones, text, etc. Like active record and active resource, active support is available as a separate gem that is installed as a dependency of the Rails gem.
5. Bundler – Bundler manages the gem dependencies of a ruby application in a repeatable way across multiple machines. It automatically looks for and installs / updates all the gems needed by the application when it is deployed on a machine. It can do this is a repeatable way across multiple machines and deployments.
6. Capistrano – Capistrano is a tool for executing command on groups of servers over SSH. It is used mainly in deploying web applications and is capable recognizing different types of server environment (like staging and production, etc).
7. Capybara – This is an advanced version of the Webrat tool. It lets you do acceptance testing of applications using various drivers (Selenium and Rack are built-in) by simulating a real user hitting your web application.
8. CoffeeScript – Coffee-script is a little language that compiles into java-script. It has rapidly become very popular and has been included in Rails 3.1 as the default method of writing JavaScript code in a Rails application. I am personally a bit on the fence here but I like its terse syntax.
9. Cucumber – Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable DSL and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid – all rolled into one format. Cucumber along with RSpec are main tools used for the BDD methodology favored in many Rails projects.
10. DSL(Domain Specific Language) – A domain-specific language is a language dedicated to a particular domain or the representation of a particular problem or solution. DSL’s are more common than you think, some good examples in the Ruby being – Cucumber, Rake, Haml etc.
11. ERB (Embedded Ruby) – ERB is a simple and powerful templating system for Ruby. It is part of the Ruby core and it allows one to place ruby within other files (any text document).
12. FactoryGirl – This is a gem that can be used for creating object factories in an automated fashion. This is useful in testing or even for populating an application when deployed
13. Gem – At its most basic form, a Ruby gem is a package. It has the necessary files and information for being installed on the system. There is an online repository for Ruby gems at http://rubygems.org/ For me this is the biggest find and literally the “hidden gem” of my Ruby learning experience has been – Ruby Gems.  It’s like having an app-store for your development needs, where most of the best gems are freely available to you!  The number of awesome, useful gems actually available to ruby developers means that we have a huge advantage over other frameworks. A testament to the power of Ruby gems has been that Microsoft has started its own package management library – Nuget which, seems to be simply a straight lift of the Ruby Gems concept, except of course they have incorporated it into the Visual Studio as an extension. Nuget was released by the same team that created the Microsoft version of Rails – ASP.Net MVC so you can see the Rails influence…
14. Gherkin – Gherkin is a DSL  that emerged from the Cucumber project. It was designed to succinctly describe behavior in a form that can be acted upon by a tool like Cucumber. It is described as business readable DSL and can be used in any project that has need of such a tool. The lexer and parser for the language has been create and the library is available in several frameworks including Ruby, JVM, Javascript (Node.js) and as a .NET dll.
15. Git – Git is a free and open source, distributed version control system. It was written by Linus Torvalds to replace the old source control system for Linux and has become one of the tools of choice for a lot of Ruby projects. Git is typically used along with Github which is an online source control repository that leverages Git.
16. Haml – Haml is an HTML abstraction language. Haml functions as a replacement for inline page templating systems such as PHP, ASP, and ERB, the templating language used in most Ruby on Rails applications.
17. Heroku – Heroku is a cloud based platform as a service (PaaS) which was one of the first to have Ruby and Rails support. One could build a Rails application and directly deploy it on Heroku without having to set up a web-server. The platform has evolved to support multiple languages including Java, Scala, Node.js, Clojure and Python.
18. jQuery – jQuery has become the JavaScript framework of choice for web developers everywhere. It is a fast, framework that leverages CSS style selectors to allow developers to traverse, animate and handle events in the HTML DOM while abstracting browser specific quirks as far as possible. It has become so popular that it displaces Prototype as the default JavaScript framework used in Rails 3 applications.
19. Memcached – A distributed open source caching system, memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. It is a generic store and can be used in any situation where caching is needed and is available in multiple languages and technologies. It is used in a lot of Rails applications even though today, other object stores like Redis are getting popular.
20. Merb – Like Ruby on Rails, Merb is an MVC framework. But, it a lighter and more barebones version. I haven’t used Merb – I’d love it if someone could give a more apt description of what Merb is and how it compares to Rails and Sinatra.
21. Open classes / Monkey Patching – Open classes is a feature of the Ruby language where you can simply open and add methods to existing classes. Active support library uses this feature to add a lot of its helper functions on the Ruby core classes like string. A popular name for this particular practice is “Monkey Patching”.
22. Paperclip – Its a complete (and easy) file attachment library for active record. It provides validation features based on the properties of the file like size, type, etc. The files themselves are saved in the filesystem. It has some basic image manipulation features as well, like creating thumbnails etc. There is a dependency on the ImageMagick library (an awesome image manipulation library) in order to use Paperclip.
23. Prototype – Prototype is a JavaScript Framework that aims to ease development of dynamic web applications. It was originally the default JavaScript framework bundled with Rails.
24. Rack –  Rack is a gem that provides a simple interface between a web-server and the Ruby web framework. Rack is used in various Ruby web frameworks, like Rails, Sinatra and Merb.
25. Rake – Rake is the ruby version of make but much more developer friendly. It provides capabilities that are similar to make but it uses the Ruby syntax instead of XML files or makefile syntax to define tasks.
26. REST(Representational State Transfer) – REST is a set of principles that define how Web standards, such as HTTP and URIs, are supposed to be used. Well, actually REST as a concept is more abstract than that – its architectural style that can be applied to distributed systems. REST in the context of Rails, mainly is used to refer to the way Rails exploits REST concepts in the way that Rails web applications are structured.
27. RJS(Ruby JavaScript) – It is a ruby helper used to generate JavaScript that are used to decorate HTML pages. It is used mainly in AJAX calls, and in situations where you wanted to conditionally emit JavaScript. The general opinion though was that it sucked and was avoided in favor of the unobtrusive style of jQuery.
28. Routing – Routing is the aspect of the Rails web application that deals with the translation of a URL request to a specific action in the application. In Rails, it is the job of the router to recognize URLs and dispatch them to a controller’s action. It can also generate paths and URLs, avoiding the need for hardcoded strings in your views.
29. RSpec – RSpec is a Behaviour-Driven Development tool for Ruby programmers. RSpec helps you do the TDD part of that equation, focusing on the documentation and design aspects of TDD. Like Cucumber RSpec uses a DSL to simplify design and implementation tests.
30. Ruby Debug – Just like it says on the tin – it is a debugger for ruby applications. Like the other tools it is gem that can be installed and can run your ruby application in debug mode.
31. RVM(Ruby Version Manager) – This is an awesome tool from Wayne Seguin that is used to install, manage and work with multiple versions of the Ruby programming language on your machine. It even allows you to segregate your gems so you could work with multiple versions of the same gem for different applications.
32. SASS & SCSS – These are CSS abstraction languages (I believe SCSS is a reference to the version that supports CSS3). They are compiled down to CSS. They allow you use variables, modules and include other files. I am not very familiar with them and would welcome more information from readers.
33. Sinatra – From the website – “Sinatra is a DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort.” Like Merb, Sinatra is a minimalist web framework. Again, like Merb, I haven’t used Sinatra at all and would welcome some comments to flesh out this entry.
34. Test::Unit – This is the default testing library available with Ruby. It is from the xUnit family of testing frameworks and is a part of the core Ruby libraries. It is mostly not used in favor of more powerful BDD style tools like RSpec.
35. UJS(Unobtrusive Javascript)– “Unobtrusive JavaScript” is a general approach to the use of JavaScript in web pages. The general principles of this approach includes –
    1. Separation of behavior from the markup – The HTML in a document is meant to describe the structure of the document and should not contain programmatic elements in it. This is similar to the principle of separation of the structure from the presentation of the document when talking about the separation of CSS and HTML.
    2. Should not pollute the global namespace – UJS code should add as little as possible to the global object or global namespace of the environment in which it runs.
    3. Degrade gracefully – If the browser rendering the document does not have the capability needed the code should be able to degrade gracefully without breaking the rest of the application.
36. Vim – IMO Vim, the text editor that just celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2011 has experienced a resurgence of sorts with the rise of Ruby and Rails. In fact there is a large number of Vim plugins that have been created to make developers even more productive and happy on this text editor. Indeed after Textmate (the other favored tool for Rails developers) I think Vim has the biggest following among Rails developers and the fact that its available even on Linux and Windows only makes it cooler…
37. Web Servers – Apache, nginx, Lighthttpd , Thin – In the Rails world web servers options include Apache, nginx and lighty(lighthttpd) of which Apache is by far the most popular. I have included Thin in this list as well since it includes both a web-server and an application server. With advent of PaaS providers like Heroku, this particular aspect of web application development is becoming abstracted out, just as the database is getting abstracted on the other end.
38. Webrat – This is a headless browser that is used in web application testing. It lets you run in browser test without the associated overhead of actually instantiating a browser. This does not execute any JavaScript but is great for doing tests of simple websites without much JS interactions.
39. Will_Paginate – This is the most popular pagination library out there for Ruby on Rails. It alos supports other Ruby web frameworks like Sinatra and Merb. This gem has a wide variety of formatting options and can accept an active record object or even a simple array. It is quite configurable and can be easily extended to do AJAX pagination as well.

So, that’s all the terms that I can think of so far, I’ll try to add to this as and when I come across more terms. Nowadays, web development is more than a single framework, even one like Rails.  I have found the Rails community is more open and embracing of different ideas and frameworks – even to the extent of moving away from Rails and using lightweight frameworks like Sinatra. IMO that makes this glossary all the more relevant and fun.

As I have mentioned in the article I don’t profess to be an expert about or have even used all the tools and technologies listed above. I would love to get your comments and suggestions on what could be added.

And last but not the least – I wish you all an awesome 2012 – may all your efforts bear fruit this year.

Update (Jan 12 – 2012) : Since there has been some interest in this post, I have added a few more entries and provide more information where I can – stay tuned :-)

Google Android and the CLI

Today morning I was reading about Brad Adams – Going Google and ruminating about what he wanted to do there when several earlier articles I had read suddenly came together and I had an inspiration that I thought I’d blog.

It would by really cool if Brad and Tim Bray (who recently left Sun and joined Google Android) get together and implement the CLI on the Android OS.

Brad is one of the architects of the CLI and has been one of the main driving forces behind the development of the .NET framework and it’s adoption. He is currently looking at what he wants to do when he starts at Google. He mentioned that he thinks the cloud plus devices is one of the dominant trends of the future and I agree.

I think the Android OS is an important part of this future and currently I am frustrated that there is only Java support for developing in it. Tim shares my frustrations and he is looking at getting other languages supported in the Android OS.  He is looking at Ruby right now – it’s open source and a dynamic language and it makes sense . But I feel the CLI (which is an open ECMA specification) is a great fit for the Android OS because it can be used to as a basis to quickly support a lot of languages.  Besides as a .NET developer myself, I think that having the capability to develop Android applications in C# or IronPython is a far more palatable proposition than doing it in Java :-)

I saw this article by Miguel de Icaza where he puts out an idea to incorporate the CLI into the browser engine so that we could use languages other than Javascript in our client-side scripting (my take on that is here). It occurs to me that it should be similarly possible to bring it into the Android OS as well.  There are currently efforts to port Mono that could be used as a starting point.

So what say guys – can we get the .NET CLI in Google Android ?  Become the opposite of the Apple iPhone and embrace developers instead of driving them away :-)

Some great Internet reading

The other day a colleague of mine asked me about finding software books on the Internet – he was talking about some of the books I had listed in my previous post. Now, that post referred mainly to books that are published and distributed on paper as physical books (some of them are available for sale in other formats like PDF, Mobi and Kindle as well).

However, there are a lot of books on the Internet and even more lists of books.  I think we sometimes forget, that, besides being a directory of books, the Internet is itself a huge repository of amazing content. So caught up are we nowadays – in the real-time fire-hose of social networks and status updates – we have started overlooking some of the really good articles out there. So, in the interests of providing everyone (and myself) some links to leverage I thought I’d write a post about some of the great content available out there from the software programming perspective …

The best way to get a good list of books about software is to go where software geeks congregate and search. Almost invariably, someone would have asked or talked about the best software books and sparked off the list mania :-) Go to a few websites like this and look for the names that pop-up again and again. Stack Overflow is a great example of this – it is a forum for software related questions and though, of late, they have started discouraging open-ended and subjective questions, there are some really great list of books out here. A few of my favorite lists are –

• Good Programming Books
• Freely Available
• Recommended Reading from Coding Horror

Of course, like all on-line lists these are updated from time to time so you need to keep going back from time to time to get the latest lists.

The next place I go to are websites that are book repositories and directories. One of the biggest out there is the Wiki Books project – they have a great listing of open books and an entire section is devoted to Computing . There are other websites that specialize in technical books – a couple I go to are –

• http://www.freetechbooks.com
• http://www.onlinecomputerbooks.com

Another meta-list I go to is my own :-). I leverage on-line bookmarking (I use Delicious) extensively  – I tag my entries profusely and you can slice and dice my list across quite a few dimensions – feel free to do this and pick your favorite lists :-)

• http://delicious.com/technike/development+learning
• http://delicious.com/technike/programming+learning

An example of an extremely influential article is, the Agile Manifesto, that provided so much momentum to the agile methodologies and the establishment of agile as an alternate development methodology in use today. One person whose articles have influenced a whole generation is Richard Stallman – his articles are available here. I am also a fan of Eric S Raymond’s writing – keeper of the Jargon file – most of his articles have turned to books –

• The Art of Unix Programming
• The Cathedral and The Bazaar
• Zen of Unix

Along the same lines of ground breaking articles is the 1972 Turing Award Lecture by E. W. Dijkstra one of the true giants in the field of programming. There is a PDF version here.

There are some great on-line tutorials on various topics –

• Mercurial Source Control Tool
• Learning Haskell
• How to think like a Computer Scientist
• Thinking in Java

There are a lot more – I haven’t listed then explicitly here so feel free to post comments on what you think I should have added.

Some other influential blogs and articles include –

• Martin Fowler’s Bliki
• Coding Horror
• Joel on Software – The Joel Test
• Bob Martins Principles of OOD

A couple of the links in the list above are to blogs rather than individual articles – this is because I believe those blogs to have a lot of influential articles :-)

Obviously this is an incomplete list – I have written only of the content that I know of today. I hope to be able to add to it and update it with your help :-)  Please post your suggestions and links to improve it :-)

Update : Via Renju – CLR via C# and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture

Here is a list by Martin Fowler of books he participated in creating.

I would also like to add my friend Praseed’s posts –  if you are starting out on C/C++ in GNU-Linux these can give you good boost in the right direction :-)

Quietube – Readability for videos

I was thinking a few weeks back, while wading though yet another banner ad heavy website to get to a video, about asking the folks behind Readability for something similar for videos. I filed away the thought for later and soon forgot about it (I think this is why I am not a millionaire ;-)).  Anyway, while going through other blog posts on Readability the other day I came across this one from a fellow Readability enthusiast from Brazil – right at the bottom was the link to this gem.  Et´ Voila ! Solution found – this is why I love the internet :-)

Quietube is exactly what I was thinking about – its Readability for internet videos !
Even the installation is similar –

1. Go to the Quietube installation page.
2. Drag the bookmarklet on to your bookmarks toolbar or add it to your bookmarks.
3. When you are in a one of the big internet video websites (YouTube, BBC iPlayer, Viddler, and Vimeo are supported) – click on the bookmarklet and you can see the video without any of the comments and distracting fluff.
4. A link is also available at the bottom of the page enabling you to send this view of the video to a friend or save it for further viewing.

The tool is built by BookTwo and from the blog post it seems its a side project inspired by Readability. The tool is currently limited, in that it does not detect embedded videos in other websites (and the error message seems a bit cheeky ;-)) but they are working on improving this. Another problem is that there seems to be no mechanism to report issues to the group like Readability. On the whole this seem to be a useful tool for those who want to quietly watch a video without all the bells and whistles :-)

web 2.0, software, tool, bookmarklet,

Readability – Transform the way you read on the web !

I love reading – I read books, articles, magazines, circulars, just about anything I can lay my eyes on… Naturally, I am a voracious reader in the Internet as well – I have subscribed to a huge number of RSS feeds, and  have a constant stream of Twitter tweets on articles to read.

The problem, I face when reading on the internet is, eye fatigue – I have astigmatism and the varying fonts faces, sizes and colors is a strain – even to normal people with perfect sight ! Couple this with the increasing number of advertising on the top and on the side of articles and you have a situation where the actual content is increasingly obscured. Font sizes are getting smaller and smaller and content is getting squeezed more and more by advertising and marketing clutter.

Of late, I have been using a tool that I found on the web (I saw it on Twitter but I have unfortunately been unable to track who sent it to me :-( ) that has literally transformed my reading experience. It was created by a company called Arc90 and is a Bookmarklet which can dragged onto your browser bookmarks. When you click on it – it  reloads the current page loaded in your browser stripped all extraneous fluff.  Simply the content of the page is shown.

As a web-developer and general internet addict ;-), I have seen a lot of tools and gadgets and I like to think I have a good idea of what works – as soon as I saw this tool I knew this would be awesome. The concept is simple, powerful – elegant.  It is one of those things
that seem so obvious  – when you feel that way – you know you are seeing a work of genius.

What you need to do to get this gadget is  –

1. Go to the Readability installation page
2. Choose from the simple options given there how you want your content to be displayed – the options are simple and straightforward giving you a choice of reading style, font size and margin width (I chose eBook style, large size and narrow margin). A sample text is shown with the formatting you choose so you can play with the options.
3. Once you are satisfied, simply drag the big button marked “Readability” onto your bookmark toolbar (or you can right click the link and choose the bookmark option) and your done !
4. Next time you are on a web-page with a compelling article being obscured by garish ads and decorations, simply click on the Bookmarklet and the page reloads with the content formatted exactly as you want it.

When I first installed it they had fewer options and every once in awhile it would not work – but they have been going from strength to strength with new options and it’s rare to see it not work.

This tool has certainly transformed how I read on the web – I can’t recommend this tool enough!!  So what are you waiting for – go get it !! :-)

PS: It won the NY Times Pogy award for best idea of 2009

web 2.0, software, tool, bookmarklet, font

What is Adobe Flash,Flex and AIR?

Ever since the Internet started becoming a platform for business, people have been working on ways to enhance the limitations of HTML.  One way to do this was to get the user to download and install extensions to the basic browser platform that had the capabilities to run the code used to create regular user interfaces. Several companies introduced various different types of extension – some of the notable efforts in this space are Microsoft with ActiveX controls, Sun with Java Applets and Adobe with Flash. In this post I am going to talk a bit about Adobe’s products in this space.

Over the past couple of years Adobe has been on a platform expansion binge and have significantly added to their capabilities as a web development platform alternative to Microsoft’s .NET and Sun’s Java. So lets start at the beginning – first Adobe introduced the Flash player which was essentially an animation and video platform with some development features (Adobe Flash uses a language called Actionscript) .

As the concept of Rich Internet Applications (as these extensions came to be called) started getting more traction and mind share with the advent of AJAX based technologies – Adobe introduced the AIR platform and the Adobe Flex framework.

The AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) platform is a cross platform runtime on which one can deploy applications built using Adobe Flash, HML, AJAX or Adobe Flex on the desktop. Thus AIR is a means by which the developer of an RIA application can extend their presence on to the computers desktop and become independent of the browser.

The Adobe Flex Framework is a bit like Microsoft XAML or Mozilla XUL in that it is uses an XML based language (called MXML) that you use to describe your user interface. You can use in conjunction Actionscript to create applications Flex is an Adobe framework that leverages the Adobe AIR and Adobe Flash run-times. While the framework itself is open source (it’s not free though), the underlying run-times that it targets are proprietary (though I believe they now support the WebKit HTML engine as well which is an open source run-time). Both AIR and the Flex Framework are freely available, Adobe sells an eclipse based tool called Flex Builder that lets easily build powerful applications using the Flex Framework.

A predecessor to all these frameworks you might want to consider is OpenLaszlo.
It is open source framework I came across a couple of years back that
was already supporting flash and I believe now they support a wide
variety of platforms.

Another interesting open source project in this space is Curl which is an MIT project

The competition have not been standing still, however. Microsoft has unveiled Microsoft Silverlight and it’s open source (Mono) counterpart Moonlight, Mozilla has the Prism project and Sun has JavaFX. I don’t know much about Prism or JavaFX but I haven’ seen much traction around either of them.

Finally the HTML 5 specification got off the ground. It has started addressing some of the fundamental issues with the HTML specification and introduced elements for richer media than text like audio and video (along the same lines as image). The web-browser space has also started embracing the specification working to include support for these elements – AFAIK – Opera, Firefox’s Gecko engine and Google Chrome’s Webkit engine are neck and neck in their effort  to support HTML 5 specification with IE 8 following them.

Adobe, Flash, Flex, AIR

Google – The OS re-defined…

So finally after all the rumors, speculation and denials – it’s out there in black and white – Google has announced the Google Chrome OS .
This has led to a flurry of speculation of course the biggest being the impact on Microsoft (check out this cartoon by Federico Feini – :-) )

The details are :-

1. It would be a custom version of the GNU/Linux kernel.
2. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.
3. It would initially be targeted for use in netbooks.
4. It is different from the Android Mobile OS which was designed to target various devices (and form-factors) from phones and set-top boxes to netbooks. The Google Chrome OS would be for people that spend a lot of their time on the internet and will target power computers.
5. Plan to release in the middle of 2010.
6. It would be open-source so expect code for developers to play sometime soon.

I am for one am going to follow this with much interest and keep my fingers crossed that it works out. If this is anything like Google Chrome – I would be willing to install it and give it a fair shot at becoming my default OS. that being said there is still a long way to go and quite a bit of competition too – especially given that it’s going to be a flavor of Linux, which we know does not suffer from a lack of flavors :-)

I noted in a post at the beginning of the year that Google had pulled the plug on several projects. It was named Google hunkers down.

Well it looks like that was just a breather – a clearing of the slate for the big guns – Google is back !!

Oh and by the way – Google Apps (GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar and GTalk) is out of beta :-) This seems more to satisfy the paying customers than any new release of functionality :-)

PPS :

Google Wave looks awesome

Check out the Google Wave – this is AWESOME stuff and when it comes out could transform your social media universe completely. You simply have to see the video (it’s a little long) to believe it – instant messaging that’s truly instant, collaboration in real-time…. here is an abridged version of the unveiling –

The application UI is written using HTML 5 (canvas element, video element, geolocation, App Cache, etc) and will render in the mordern browsers. This of course implies Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome etc

The other reason why I think it’s so cool is that Google is borrowing a page from Microsoft and involving developers. The Google Waves are extensible and the communication protocol used is open source , there are APIs available for developers as well as a sandbox environment where developers can try out their code. You can even set-up your own Google Wave server – which is really cool when you start thinking of enterprises and the possibilities of collaboration there…  It’s insane I tell you –  the only catch is – it’s not available yet.  It’s in private beta – you can sign up to be informed when it goes public – wonder when mere mortals like me can play with it.