Major Time waster coming... when?

Ironically, I just started re-playing Diablo II with a paladin - a character class I had never played when the game was relatively new. Turns out it screams on modern hardware. ;-)

Re-reading the mythical man month

I've been re-reading The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks (20th anniversary edition), in particular the "The Mythical Man-Month after 20 years" chapter. I'm amazed that he basically presages large parts of The Agile Manifesto - which was written down in 2001 and was viewed by some as radical. 

The manifesto states, in short:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools 
  
• Working software over comprehensive documentation 
  
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation 
  
• Responding to change over following a plan
  

We value the things on the right, but we value the things on the left more.

In practice, these are often realized with practices like iterative, incremental development, automated unit tests, daily or continuous integration, empowered teams (a la scrum), daily short stand-up meetings to keep everyone in synch, among others.

Some of the section titles in Brook's essay are:

• An Incremental-Build Model Is Better - Progressive Refinement
  
• Microsoft's "Build Every Night" Strategy
  
• People Are Everything (Well, Almost Everything)
  
• The Power of Giving Up Power
  

I think it's wonderful that a lot of the ideas that "agile development" pushes in fact have very very deep and old roots in the history of software development.

Alas, amazon - we hardly knew ye

I've never seen this before, and it's a little scary. Amazon.com is down. This was taken on 6/6/08, at 12:20 PM central time.