Place them in social areas e.g. the kitchen and beam useful and interesting stuff to them! I like the “API” i.e. just images. Can imagine all sorts of fun data and feeds – Burndown’s, build stats, mash-ups of company stock performance and random interesting data and pictures.

Fundamentally we work in the same ways, yes we have test driven design, yes we unit test, but are we looking beyond this to “agile”- value driven development environments that reduce the cost to create code, that allow customers to even create some of the assets? I don’t see it (personally). Where is the blend of computer science and mathematical rigor in our work? Why are we, for example, defining “glue” logic by hand – Code it in a formal state machine description? Tie components together using a formal language and build tools that testers and customers can use to work in this language (under the hood). Unite all customers around the code, do not exclude or provide layers requiring interpretation (and a chance for errors).

The more I read about flow based programming and look at the games industry (especially in the area of “tools” which allow children to construct robust software). The more I think we (as software engineers) should be re-thinking how we actually construct and build software and more importantly how we allow different stakeholders to access and modify it.

As an aside I’m contemplating ditching git for now (but will play with it), subversion has better support and to be honest it is actually more appropriate for the way I’m currently developing. Will mull over this for a day or two and try using git in earnest…

Instead of humans entering text, services would broadcast information (say XML encoding simple types only) along with a “theme” tag. Other services would decide to listen to broadcast events based on theme and data and even go on to produce their on data feeds – ad infinitum. Essentially automated mash-up’s of all sorts of data.

This would be akin to listening to RSS feeds and generating endless new ones based on who was listening, this would repeat to whatever depth the system could handle.

The system would be very dynamic and if services dwindled in attention flocking of mashed up data would also occur.

Possibly Twitter could be subverted to handle this – through sending XML

Annoyingly Redmine (at the minute) doesn’t show git branch information – I can live with this for now (+ other features I lost in the Trac to Redmine, svn to git journey).

With all this server/scm set-up activity over with (for now). I can finally concentrate on nudging some of my creaking rails applications to edgy versions and throw them out for people to use (or not).

I’m slightly aware that this blog reads like mr geek lives here!

After an evening of re-remembering ‘c’ and fighting gcc warnings it ran! Seeing the text appear took me back a few years to times of playing text adventures.

Now all I need to do is design my flat and send some invites out. If this is too difficult then I will probably just opt for a vintage mud fest!

TinyMud

During some internet searching I bumped into wikipedia and TinyMud. The comment in wikipedia about instances of this old mud being rare made me a little sad so I have decided to resurrect it for a party in a couple of weeks time. This is similar to the “Brigadoon Day” except I will leave it running on the slice.

I have managed to find the ‘c’ source code from 1989 and I’m working on getting it compiled again – mainly just #include issues, so it should go ok.

Once complete I intend to re-create my flat and invite as many folk as I can for a party, given it allows basic construction of new objects I wonder what might result.

Update (2010-01-26), I have it running, just need to map out my flat!

I expect to release in the middle of February, how the world waits.