I'm pro Agile, big A or little. In part I think it really is the best fit for software development as a process.

Before Agile I had experience of two main schools of software development, neither a particularly good fit.

Big Development Up Front (BDUF) involves detailed specification on all elements of the software being written in advance and then the final product is expected to exactly match. There would be an in-depth quality assurance stage after the development period.

There are numerous problems with this approach:

BDUF processes are highly dependant on the initial specification being entirely correct. I found this to rarely be the case: the fact is that getting a spec right first time on paper alone with no prototypes or demos is almost impossible.
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I Am Legend is one of my favourite sci-fi books. If you haven't read it I'd suggest that you get yourself a copy now and don't read this post - spoilers follow...

Recently I Am Legend has been made into a film with Will Smith. He's actually pretty good in it (apart from looking constipated when his dog dies). My problem with the film is that they completely changed the ending. It shouldn't be a surprise - they did the same thing in the Charlton Heston version.

Bad grammar is almost the standard these days. It seems like every day I have a good reason to refer people to this little lesson:

It's not just apostrophes - other common errors include capitalising every noun, inserting random commas all over the place and no knowing the difference between they're, their and there. It's almost as if no-one teaches grammar any more.

Management is supposed to be one of the most stressful possible careers. It certainly feels like that sometimes. I'm not talking about the top level decision makers here - while running a company is undeniably stressful it's that productive, constructive kind. I'm talking about the several levels of 'middle' management, from line-level to some supposedly quite senior roles with "director" in the title.

The price of a litre of diesel is now regularly over £1.20, and I don't ever see that coming down. A full tank for my car now costs over £50!

This is it, this is the fossil fuel crunch that they've been on about for the last 50 years. It's not a sudden running out, it just costs steadily more and more to get the stuff out of the ground.

For years now the average commute has been going up. For professional and specialised roles over 20 miles each day appears the norm.

My division has just re-branded for the fourth time in two years. The software my team works on needs new branding applied again. The frustrating thing for me is not that it has changed, there was a real business reason each time, but that each and every time the graphic designers and marketing specialists take little account of software needs.

Every time I've ever got branding guidelines (at any organisation that I've worked for) they were focused on print:

Logo as an EPS/AI file.
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I recently came across a problem with floating point numbers. I know there are some inherent inaccuracies, but I was surprised to find a problem with a relatively simple number.

Floats are numbers stored as two parts: a whole number and an exponent. Generally you're dealing with numbers on similar scales, i.e. millimetres or kilometres, so this makes sense.

The term "float" refers to the fact that the decimal point 'floats'.
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