Copernicus, happy 548th birthday!

On this day in 1473, Nicolaus Copernicus, a Polish mathematician, and astronomer, was born. His masterpiece De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, triggered the Copernican Revolution, laying the foundations for the Scientific Revolution.

  1. Documentation system - Wonderful clarification. There are four different types of documentation with four different purposes:

    • tutorials – they teach a small child how to cook
    • how-to guides – recipes in a cookery book
    • technical reference - reference encyclopedia articles
    • explanation – an article on culinary social history

  2. I followed my dreams and got demoted to software developer – I’m not a fan of “following a dream”. I’m more on prof. Cal Newport’s “skills trump the passion” from So Good They Can’t Ignore You. But I know at least two guys who converted to full-time developers from non-technical fields at the age of 40 because they dreamed about it. Perhaps prof. Randy Pausch’s had his merits in Last Lecture?

  3. 24 Quick Xcode Tips from invaluable Paul Hudson. If you use Xcode, don’t even finish the day without glancing through it at least. Half are the real gems, not some lousy “command-click to rename”. And do have a look at the great tips and tricks at the end of that, too.

  4. Technical debt is not the cost of repaying the debt: it is the cost of owning the debt. from On Exactitude in Technical Debt

  5. Please do remember that Agile originally came from engineers who wanted to fix unproductive development activities, and only later we got agile coaches. Lovely comment to a video below. Yes, I know, for a failure at that scale, we should use Kanban and just adjust WIP accordingly:

    Not bad, but I’d like to see a more agile approach. Does he even have an assigned task for this to account for his time spent? This wasn’t even in the backlog. My question is, why was I not made aware of this and how can we all improve continuously? I need to know what he felt his shortcomings were and what he plans on doing to address those and be better.

#docs #dreams #xcode #agile #tech-debt