Launched a New Web Page for Lean GTD 2007

I’ve just created a new webpage for my Outlook 2007 GTD macro package, instead of just maintaining it in its original blog post from 2006. I’d recommend anyone using Outlook 2007 and David Allen‘s GTD methodology to try it out! It simplifies most basic operations significantly, to a very low price (that is, completely free). What I like most about it is that it doesn’t add lots of complexity, like handling dependencies between projects and actions, and in that way, everything can be synced to your mobile phone and to another computer without losing important information.

Just head over there or download it right away! Instructions are inside the .bas file.

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How to Make Agile Processes Scalable

Nick Malik writes about how to make agile software development processes scale up to larger projects. How? Through an agile architecture! Nice to  read. Of course there are other complications, too, but this is an essential one.

Design is Not Functional Decomposition

Nick Malik writes about the common misconception about design, that you just have to follow a well-defined process to break down a problem in its constituents, and voila, you’ve got the design! No way it’s that easy. That’s an easy trap for those people who excel in model driven development, I think.

More On Google Chrome Responsiveness

The Chromium Blog has published more stuff on how to get the Google Chrome GUI responsive. Very interesting to read! Today they’re discussing how plugins affect responsiveness.

GUI Responsiveness in Google Chrome

Over at the Chromium Blog, there’s a post about Google Chrome’s I/O principles. Finally an improvement in GUI responsiveness from the prevalent industry standard. What if Microsoft implemented this in their Office suite, too? I’ve always argued that GUIs should be responsive at all times, thus showing the state of the application, instead of just hanging.

Service vs. Function part II

I just came up with a pretty good explanation of the difference between a service and a function, to clarify on a recent post. It kind of explains why it is difficult to reach an agreement, since people are discussing on different levels. So, watch this: Suppose that you’re a consultant, and you have a contract to perform a certain task, with certain deliverables and other agreements on what’s included. Then the service is the contract, and what you actually do is the function. This works for software services as well as for services of an enterprise that are comprised not only of software, but also of people and organizations.

A Software Development Q&A that Could Work

Joel Spolsky has set up a new Software Development Q&A, called Stack Overflow, together with Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror. If you’re used to the common kinds of web forums that turn up when you have a programming question, you’ll like this one. It’s content is completely user driven (digg-like), so that good answers get voted up by the users, and bad ones are voted down. No discussion is possible (because of this reordering), so the Q&A will only contain questions and answers. Sounds like a really good idea. Take a look!

Larry Osterman on Concurrency

A year ago, Larry Osterman wrote a series on programming with concurrency, that I took the time to read the other day. It’s in fifteen parts, but it’s definitely worth reading! Even if you’re quite experienced with concurrency and multithreading, you’ll definitely find things you hadn’t thought about. For example this.

The links to the various parts in the series are in the "Wrapping it all up" post (the first link in this post).

Joel Again

Just don’t miss Joel‘s latest article! As always, it’s full of insights.

Ajax vs. SOA

While surfing the web, I happened to find a blog entry by Dion Hinchcliffe, containing some interesting observations on the conflict between Ajax and SOA, related to my recent discussion with Dag König. The most interesting part is the enumeration at the end of the post, under the heading "SOA Implications".

Ha, Dion’s blog is the first one I’ve seen that looks like a OneNote notebook! That’s cool. Well, reasonably cool, at least.