Warren Seen

Tasmania is a small place, which is why I’m surprised that very few people in the IT industry here have heard of Morfik, a Hobart based development company. Reading this morning’s Read/Write Web however, things may be about change there. As reported by Richard, slashdot are running a post about the Morfik patent which appears to be aimed squarely at Google’s GWT.

I’m in two minds about this, as I always am about software patents. On the one hand, Morfik was clearly first to the party in terms of public release of a JavaScript compiler, according to the patent they had a provisional granted prior to the release of the GWT. On the other, I have to wonder how this is any different to the multitude of language translation techniques already out there, or at least whether it’s significantly inventive enough to pass the “not obvious to a practitioner in the field” test.

But hey, this wouldn’t be the first patent to be granted despite the obviousness of it to someone with half a brain. I mean, thank goodness the patent doesn’t mention Ruby, I guess that means RJS is safe!

Update: If you think I’m being arrogant, I assure you, I’m just trying to be assertive

(For the background that inspired this post, see here, here and here.)

Why are you reading this post? Perhaps you’re thinking of becoming one of my clients. Perhaps you’re a freelancer yourself, or thinking of becoming one. Perhaps you feel that I’m just an insufferably opinionated t**t with whom you disagree and are keen to let me have it in the comments (Feel free by the way, provided you have a reasonable argument, and aren’t just going to call me an insufferably opinionated t**t).

Why a manifesto? I know, I know, it’s an overused term, but I wanted to describe something of my approach to freelance software development, one which has been successful for me so far. I’m not deliberately setting out to be controversial, but no doubt I will be, and as long as it starts reasonable debate, that’s a good thing.

So without further ado…
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Interesting article about the use of the “Committer Model” in commercial software development, borrowed from the open source community.

The committer model solves a few problems of open source distributed development, but the primary one is that of trust: in a developers intent and in their competence. There are other issues that push different buttons depending on the project, but in the end, these are just indicators of intent or competence.

Personally, I think this is a bit of an extreme approach in the average commercial development project - certainly for teams under 10 developers I would call it excessive - as the same issues don’t apply in a commercial project.

Firstly, you must implicitly trust the intent of the developers which you are paying to write the software - and if you don’t, why are they working for you to begin with? Secondly, if you’ve hired them, then you already have made a decision based on their competence.

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When I started this blog last month, I thought “Standard Deviation” was a snappy title. Of course, I also knew about standard deviation as a statistical tool, however I didn’t expect that this overlap would cause Google search to drive 50+ visitors a month here looking for implementations of the standard deviation formula.

So as a “public service”, here is some code to figure standard deviation in Ruby and Java.

(disclaimer: no warranties as to correctness, particularly to the nth decimal place, don’t use this to run your home made nuclear reactor or air traffic control system, blah blah, etc, etc :-))

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No, it’s not that my pants will fall down if you do, but my Java code might get a bit less intelligible.

Ed Burnette blogs on a nasty little “feature” of Eclipse. First, a little background

Java, C, and C++ share a little syntactic quirk that has bitten all developers on the rear from time to time. Take a look at this code:

if (condition)
doSomething();
doSomethingElse();

The “doSomethingElse();” code will always be executed regardless of the value of the condition because only the “doSomething();” statement is considered part of the “if”.

This has bitten me on more than one occasion on source code that has been checked into our repository and edited by multiple people, causing the indentation to get screwed up (eg tabs and spaces). Especially when you’re scanning code you’re not familiar with, indentation is a key indication of code blocks and nesting.

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