software development

Are devs contributing to OSS happier?

September 24, 2010
software development, Motivation, Get Better, apprenticeship patterns, Free Software, Self Direction, Mastery, Freetime, Hacking, Purpose

Are devs contributing to OSS happier? # When talking to fellow developers or meeting with students it happens from time to time that I get the question of why on earth I spent my freetime working on an open source project? Why do I spend weekends at developers’ conferences like FOSDEM? Why do spent afternoons organising meetups? Why is it that I am reviewing and writing code after work for free? ...

Apprenticeship patterns (O'Reilly)

September 23, 2010
software development, apprenticeship patterns, Free Software, book, learning, Hacking

Apprenticeship patterns (O’Reilly) # A few days ago I finished reading the book “Apprenticeship Patterns” - Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman, by Dave Hoover, Adewale Oshineye. The book is addressed to readers who have the goal of becoming great software devleopers. One naive question one could ask is why there is a need for such a book at all? Students are trained in computer science at university, then enter some IT departement and simply learn from their peers. ...

Ken Schwaber in Berlin XBerg

May 24, 2009
software development, management, Scrum, General

Ken Schwaber in Berlin XBerg # Last week I attended a discussion meetup with Ken Schwaber in Berlin/ Kreuzberg. The event was scheduled pretty shortly still quite a few developers and project managers from various companies in Berlin showed up. Ken started with a brief summary of the history of Scrum: Before there was such a thing as an IT industry programming actually was a lot of fun. But somehow the creative job was turned into something people tend to suffer from pretty quickly as people tried to apply principles from manufacturing industries to software “production”. ...