Work for Bletchley

Duncan Pierce — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:56:38 +0100

Bletchley Park is one of Britain’s most historic sites, and probably the most important for computer science. During World War 2, code-breakers struggled to decode messages encrypted by the famous Enigma machines.

Pragmatic Agile Coaching book

Duncan Pierce — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:38:57 +0100

Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley’s Pragmatic Agile Coaching is available online at Pragmatic Bookshelf. The book is due out in the next few weeks.

I’ve known Liz and Rachel for a long time and they have a wealth of coaching experience. I think this will be a great book.

Robert M. Pirsig on organizational culture and software design

Duncan Pierce — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 13:40:16 +0000

On organizational culture:

No-one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically devoted to political or religious faiths or any other kind of dogmas or goals, it’s always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

New website

Duncan Pierce — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:09:50 +0100

I’ve just deployed a new website over at amarinda.com. The old one was pretty tired-looking — I think this one is a big improvement. I still need to upload details of quite a few training courses, workshops and descriptions of the coaching and mentoring I provide, but it’s a good start.

Churchill on Agile

Duncan Pierce — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:36:59 +0100

I discovered this list of quotes by Winston Churchill. Churchill had a way with words, so I picked out a few quotes that seem to say something interesting about Agile development.

On feedback:

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

Extreme Tuesday Club moves home

Duncan Pierce — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:38:33 +0000

The Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) has moved to a new home at the Counting House, 50 Cornhill, London EC3V 3PD — another Fuller’s pub. We’ve been at the Old Bank of England for 8 years now and felt it was time to try somewhere new. For those of you at XPDay this year, this was the pub we were at on Tuesday night.

Simple Javascript inheritance that works

Duncan Pierce — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:12:16 +0100

Javascript is a prototype-based language which has some slightly unusual semantics if you are used to languages like Java and C#. Classical OO inheritance isn’t trivial in Javascript – at least not conceptually. There are many webpages out there out there offering various solutions. Many of them propose complicated and strange answers to the problem, when actually it’s pretty simple.