Jez Higgins

Freelance software grandad
software created
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The Forest Road Reader, No 28

Fear and Loathing on the Agile Trail. If there's a word in software that's more overused and stripped of meaning than 'Agile' at the moment, then I don't know what it is. Seb, who has his head screwed on pretty firmly, helps you choose - or find - your own flavour of agile.

Action Comics Number 1, the first comic to feature Superman and so the first comic of the Golden Age, was published 75 years ago. Ty Templeton summarises everything you need to know about Superman in four panels.

Reading Cockburn's Crystal Clear was when I first realised that not only should you roll your own process, but that you must.

A failed investment banker rips Bitcoin to shreds. Failed investment banker? He failed at investment banking? He was a banker at a failed investment bank? Or perhaps failing at investment banking is meant, rather than a weak joke, to indicate his rationality in the face of general mentalness of economic systems. Anyway, still don't understand Bitcoin.

I promise not to exclude from consideration any idea based on its source, but to consider ideas across schools and heritages in order to find the ones that best suit the current situation.

It's a bit naughty to pull Templeton's punchline out like that. He has a pleasing personal reminisence of his work on Superman too.

The people who made the app that sells comics via iTunes declined to carry a comic, Saga 12, because they though Apple might reject it. If you read comics, even if you don't read Saga, you might already know this. (And if you don't read Saga you should give it a look, because it is effortlessly excellent. If you don't read comics, then you're a frightful cultural snob it might be fun to have a dabble with Saga.) In the end they said sorry, everyone calmed down, and it all kind of fizzled out. The general feeling seems to be it was just one of those things. You know someone got a bit excited, but it's all sorted now, Tim Cook might not be Steve Jobs but he's an ok guy, as you were, be about your business. This leaves all kinds of floating questions about cultural gatekeepers, their rules, gatekeepers to the gatekeepers, how one set of gatekeepers don't have to explicitly ban things they just need someone else to think they might, and so on, that nobody seems to want to address, least of all Apple. Perhaps because it doesn't involve a really popular comic by a high profile writer, or simply because it involves something not written in English, Apple requiring a French distributor to drop any book "revealing a breast, causing cleavage, curve, or evoking a suggestive gesture" hasn't had anything like the same coverage. That's not good, in all kinds of ways.

Not too hot, not too cold, the Kepler spacecraft finds Goldilocks zone exoplanets. Exciting stuff, although not necessarily surprising. Space is big.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?


Tagged comics, comics, space, and software-process


Jez Higgins

Freelance software grandad
software created
extended or repaired

Follow me on Mastodon
Applications, Libraries, Code
Talks & Presentations

Hire me
Contact

Older posts are available in the archive or through tags.

Feed