Bookshelved
A wiki devoted to books, reading and readers. You can see a partial catalogue of my professional library (along with some rueful comments on career progression). A particular highlight of being involved with Bookshelved was the collaborative review of Understanding Computers and Cognition.
Post-modern Programming egroup
A new group discussing the idea of "post-modern" programming, an idea introduced in this paper. Po-mo programming is possibly the most badly named movement in programming since "eXtreme" programming, to which it is in some sense the antithesis (and maybe much-needed complement, too). As well as discussion in the egroup, I also have contributed a couple of the (hopefully) growing collection of stories about post-modern programming episodes. One regarding the Romance of Modernism and the damage that being seduced by it can do, and another telling of a nifty solution to a distributed working issue.
Extreme Programming egroup
Part of the ever-growing mish-mash of discussion fora about and around XP. Stupendously high traffic, often of high quality too. Ron Jeffires seems to hold court here (and other places, don't know how he gets any work done :) Searching (and navigation of threads) is better through this front end. Click on the "Subject:" link of a message to see the thread it belongs to. Some interesting threads that I've been involved recently in include:
- Points are like Money? A wide-ranging discussion of the units used in XP-style planning for "velocity".
- A long, long thread that began with discussing a posting about refactoring on a .NET forum span off to discuss something like "do the right thing" and wandered further to look at the costs of refactoring
- A brief discussion of why you can't compare the success rates of methodologies by looking at insurance premiums
- A nice piece of technique observed at WDS
- A thread illustrating You Aren't Going to Need It in the wild
- Reporting an interesting fix to a planning problem
- Some disucssion of iteration and release cycles
- This sub-thread regarding just where the "active ingredient" in TDD lies eventually became a little bad-tempered, which hopefully means that we were on to something...
del.icio.us
Still not 100% certain what this is going to amount to, but it's interesting to see what else who's bookmarked what you have has bookmarked. Yet to come across anything revelatory, but it is interesting. Here is my library of bookmarks. And it saves me from shoving a whole bunch of links on this page. While taggin a URL on del.icio.us feels like a similar operation to saving a url on reddit they are actually quite different.
Linked-in
Sort of "Friends Reunited", except for colleagues rather than schoolmates. Has been very popular with sales and marketing types for networking purposes, and becoming more popular with techies, especially those of us on the conference circuits. Don't be foolled by the "feedback", it's all vetted by the feedbackee before being posted, so is nowhere near as strong a thing as, say, eBay feedback.
A Y Combinator startup. A news-ish site-Less of a research tool than del.icio.us, but also less febrile than the tragiacally degenerate /. Reddit may well be the thing that makes the Blogosphere into something that civilised people can tolerate. Anyway, here are (currently rather few) URLs that I have saved there.