Software Development Blogs

Here's one for you: Supposing I combine my preternatural programming skills with my well known talents as a practitioner of Voodoo Economics to come up with a software tool that can take chicken heads and source code trees as input and, as output, tells you exactly how much each line of code contributes to the company's bottom line.
Would you use it?

When I read the article Daniel referred to in his Apgar score post, and I came away with a different lesson. My central observation was that simply by tracking the Apgar score, doctors and hospitals became more interested in reviving babies that they might previously have diagnosed as stillborn.

This page contains tips on how to customize your developer.* blog to make it stand out more as *your* blog. I'll be adding new content to this page as I think of new tricks and add blog-related features to the site. Please feel free to post or email your comments, requests, or suggestions.

Learn more about developer.* Blogs.

This is an open discussion and comments thread for the article published in developer.* Magazine, "The Global Development Interview Series: Scotland, with Craig Murphy" by Donna L. Davis. If you haven't already, you can read it here, then add your comments below. If the discussion hasn't already started, no need to fear posting first!

So I decided the best thing to do was to change the developer.* blogging platform to focus more on individual bloggers. That is, we will still host blogs, and I hope that lots of smart people will continue to blog on the developer.* site, but the focus has changed.

This article contains the developer.* blogs and discussion copyright statement.

The developer.* Cooperative Digest is both an open publication platform and an interactive discussion between software developers from around the world. A Space for Ideas, we call it. The concept is based on the idea of community-based blogging, which means simply that the contributions from many individual blogs and comments come together to form a common, dynamic "publication" that changes day by day. Diversity is the norm. The whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. Membership is free, and optional. As a guest, you are encouraged to comment freely on anything you read; members get a free blog and other benefits. Use of the blog is optional, of course; many people sign up just for posting comments and logging in to read the posts.

I am thrilled and proud to announce that developer.* has been named as a finalist in the "Websites and Developer Networks" category in the 15th Annual Software Development Jolt Product Excellence Awards, which are sponsored by Software Development Magazine and Jolt Cola. For those not familiar, these are the flagship awards for the software development industry. This is indeed an honor for us, especially given the other esteemed nominees in this category. Special credit and thanks must go to all of the great contributors to developer.*.

Here is the complete list of finalists in this category:

While I was sleeping, some nice web bot came along and added about twenty different spam comments to various Cooperative Digest posts. You may have seen these before I deleted them; they all contained tons of links to online poker web sites. I was hoping this would not happen, as I wanted to leave open the ability for anonymous users to post comments. Unfortunately, in today's web frontier, that level of openness is not possible without spammers taking advantage. And now that they've found the Cooperative Digest, I'm sure the bots will be coming back for regular visits.

When registering for the developer.* Cooperative Digest, you are of course free to choose whatever user name you wish. It's your user name after all. However, we wanted to mention one piece of information that might influence your decision: if you plan to start a blog, the Cooperative Digest platform software automatically uses your user name to create the name for your blog.

For example, if your user name is jsmith, your blog will be called jsmith's Blog. However, some people might prefer to user their full identity. In that case, you can use John Smith as your user name (spaces, capital letters, and numbers are allowed), and your blog would be called John Smith's Blog.

The developer.* Cooperative Digest is both an open publication platform and an interactive discussion between software developers from around the world. A Space for Ideas, we call it. You are invited to add your ideas to the mix. If you have a reaction to something you read, we encourage you to add your comments, or take advantage of our free membership and free blog hosting. We need your voice!

Sometimes we need more than just how-to articles, API references, code snippets, and industry buzz. All of the above are essential and practical, but there is much, much more to software development than code and tools. It's good to focus also on on subjects that are harder to pin down.

Randomness, chaos, unpredictable human behavior, and subtle communication nuances are not normally part of our experience with the computers we control with our code, but these things dictate and pervade everything else around us. The hard part of this software development stuff is not the computers; it's everything else--especially the people stuff.

At one time, I had hoped that we would be able to generate some revenue from advertisements to pay the authors whose articles and essays we publish on the Articles side of the site. But I realized that there's no way to do that while also maintaining the stubbornly independent and often-not-hardcore-technical viewpoint and presentation of developer.*. To do the things necessary to fully "monetize" the site, I would have to create a site that I no longer wanted to be a part of, just another ad-laden IT portal.

"Blog" is short for "web log". A blog is a sort of public diary. A blog and its content are owned by its author, who is free to enter, or "post", whatever he or she pleases to the blog. A blog post may be as short as a few words, or as long as several paragraphs. Typically, the writings posted to a blog are spontaneous, just thoughts that come to mind.

That spontaneousness is a big part of the attraction: the author of the blog is not burdened by formality; there is no pressure to pore carefully over every word, making sure that the prose is perfect and the arguments sound. If he changes his mind tomorrow, he can do so publicly in a follow-up post.