Adactio: Links

I, Maintainer

Maintaining an open source project is a rollercoaster ride with high peaks and very low troughs.

Release frequency is down. Questions increasingly go unanswered. Issues remain in a triage, unresolved state. Uncertainty and frustration brew within the community room.

Brian’s experience with Pattern Lab very much mirrors Mark’s experience with Fractal. The pressure. The stress. But there’s also the community.

A maintainer must keep the needs of their project, their community, and their own needs in constant harmony.

This is hard!

BBC Computer Literacy Project Archive

Here’s a treasure trove of eighties nerd nostalgia:

In the 1980s, the BBC explored the world of computing in The Computer Literacy Project. They commissioned a home computer (the BBC Micro) and taught viewers how to program.

The Computer Literacy Project chronicled a decade of information technology and was a milestone in the history of computing in Britain, helping to inspire a generation of coders.

Architecting the uncertain - Getting started with Agile Software Architecture

Some ideas on the best of use of time in sprint zero of an agile project.

Understand your context

Identify risks

Understand the business process

Get testing infrastructure

Understand quality attributes

Get to know the people

Prepare an initial product backlog

Build a walking skeleton/spike

Build a learning backlog

Acephalic Agile—worse than Waterfall? - Oliver Wyman Labs: Technical

Agile itself provides us with the ability and opportunity to correct course, it allows us to steer, but it does nothing as such to help us steer correctly.

This observation about (some) agile projects is worryingly familiar:

I was suddenly seized by a horrible thought: what if this new-found agility was used, not teleologically to approach the right outcome over the course of a project, but simply to enshrine the right of middle management to change their minds, to provide a methodological license for arbitrary management? At least under a Waterfall regime they had to apologise when they departed from the plan. With Agile they are allowed, in principle, to make as many changes of direction as they like. But what if Agile was used merely as a license to justify keeping the team in the office night after night in a never-ending saga of rapidly accumulating requirements and dizzying changes of direction? And what if the talk of developer ‘agility’ was just a way of softening up developers for a life of methodologically sanctioned pliability? In short, what if Agile turned out to be worse than Waterfall?

Back to Bradshaw’s / Paul Robert Lloyd

I really like getting Paul’s insights into building his Bradshaw’s Guide project. Here he shares his process for typography, images and geolocation.

Dealing with Technical & Design Debt - Breakfast Session - Agile Swap Shop (Brighton, England) | Meetup

If you’re a project manager anywhere near Brighton, put this event in your calendar for the morning of May 30th.

CodePen Projects Is Here! - CodePen Blog

Incredibly impressive work from the CodePen team—you can now edit entire projects in your web browser …and then deploy them to a live site!

Beyond Work

An ongoing photography project from Curtis:

Beyond Work tells stories about humans at work, with no judgement or glorification. It’s an attempt at unearthing the social, cultural and functional world of work, that’s become invisible in everyday life.

Side Projects – AVC

I think the move away from side projects toward doing a startup day one is not all good. There was something great about the ability to experiment with an idea before committing to it and before sucking other people’s money into it.

The toxic side of free. Or: how I lost the love for my side project (part 1)

Have a read through all of Remy’s posts on his frustrating—but still rewarding—time running JS Bin.

Projectors don’t lie.

I’ve always liked testing on the crappiest mobile phones in the device lab—it feels like an honest stress test. I quite like the idea of using a crappy projector for the same reason.

The Pastry Box Project: Finish your projects

Words of wisdom from Seb when it comes to personal projects: finish what you start.

Most people don’t finish their projects so simply by getting it done, you’re way ahead of the crowd.

Best Collaborative Project : The Net Awards 2014

Well, this is nice: the Line-mode browser hack has been nominated in the Best Collaborative Project in the Net awards.

But 24 Ways has also been nominated, and let’s face it, that really is the best collaborative project.

There are no small changes | Inside Intercom

Des is right, y’know.

Scope grows in minutes, not months. Look after the minutes, and the months take care of themselves.

Tags: project

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