My brother Ben has launched a new project consultations.org.nz, which in due course will allow all New Zealanders to discuss and comment on draft policies and bylaws being mooted by their respective municipal councils, before they lodge formal submissions (and objections) in response to them.
consultations.org.nz also aims to publish the proposals in a web friendly [...]

Hmm, producing “unmaintainable code” is apparently one way of retaining your job… if you subscribe to the line of thinking that no manager in their right mind would wish your code upon anyone else.
To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to [...]

This is truly the dawning of the age of Agile…
We are reaching the point where we must either acclimatize or risk being bypassed. The good news is that Agile does allow us to still do the things we hold dear – research, develop a vision, and test and improve our designs – we just need [...]

Scott Ambler of IBM speaks about the benefits of the Agile development methodology, and also offers his thoughts as to why there is a reluctance among some application developers to go Agile.
It’s not really a technology issue or a domain issue. People have these excuses to not change, because change is hard. It’s not a [...]

A glossary of agile development terms for budding agile developers to swot up on, prepared by Alex Howard. Since I’ve bumbled my way through one or two stand-ups (even though I don’t know my Ruby from my Java), let’s focus on those:
A stand-up is a daily progress meeting, traditionally held within a development area. Business [...]

A gentle introduction to Agile software and application development processes… readable from the safety of your established comfort zone.
Some teams and individuals balk when a mandate to “become agile” is passed down from some “higher-up” in the organization or when some young go-getter decides to start an idealistic grassroots movement to effect change. A switch [...]

Friday 1 August is Usability Challenge 2008 day. Because the world needs a usability shake-up. And more emphasis on end user and customer testing before web or software applications are launched.
Or the layout of the cheese display is finalised at the supermarket, for that matter.
I’m talking about poor information architecture in the gourmet cheese [...]

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg says bad applications have had their day on the world’s favourite social network.
“We’ve made a lot of mistakes and there is a lot we have to learn,” Zuckerberg said. “We haven’t done enough to reward the good citizens in our ecosystem and, on the flip side, we haven’t done enough to [...]

Social networking applications can pose security risks
Your Facebook profile may be set to private, and you only accept friend requests from people you actually know, but still your private data can fall into the hands of undesirables by way of… applications.
While the mind boggles at what might be here, one result of application harvested personal [...]

Google could be superseded, says web inventor
Tim Berners-Lee talks about the rise of the Semantic web and the next phase of the web’s development, which apparently doesn’t leave much room for current search engine technology.
“Using the semantic web, you can build applications that are much more powerful than anything on the regular web,” Mr Berners-Lee [...]