I Built His Cage

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

• Helltime repeat offender Giorgio Sironi from Invisible to the eye declares the solemn death of pagination. Practically, I can’t say I agree. In fact, the only interface that I’ve seen not use pagination is DZone, the very site that listed Giorgio’s post.

  Pagination is certainly not dead at either The Company or my current work. I do concede that the likelihood that your user is looking at the second and third pages of results is low, which calls into question the effort I spent on pagination during The Project.

• RallyDev.com’s Agile Blog features a poignantly obvious analogy for Agile vs. Waterfall. Alan Atlas says that “agile” is the wrong word: it should be called “Pond”.

  Why “Pond”? I much rather compare Agile, the way I’ve experienced it, to a hockey stick: the first two weeks of the sprint feature zero closed stories, and then, like a hockey stick, the graph of story-points completed versus time juts up like the blade of a puck-swatter.

• CLOSED-LOOP blogger Jonas Bandi expresses a universal angst that us true developers deal with every day: I love programming but I hate the programming I do at work.

  I dealt with this pain just today when I dared to think about what I was doing. Those are my worst days. You can find me staring blankly at my cubicle wall, ruminating about how, if I could re-write our entire project, I would implement my current task the right way. I must control myself tomorrow, as I will be water-boarded for my thoughts on the root cause of a production bug that I fixed.

  I can’t wait.

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