Mike Spille’s recent post about ping-pong development had me both laughing and shaking my head at the same time. So many organizations, in dire need of a ‘quick fix’, end up playing ping pong. Moving from one silver bullet to another, it’s an expensive path – both financially and on development resources.

Tasked with building an online file management system for a client, I decided to take the opportunity to try building on top of the Cake framework. Based on the uber popular Ruby on Rails, Cake is already mature enough to build functional data driven web applications. After working with Cake for a few days now, I’m even more interested in giving Rails a go for my next product – and only because it seems Cake is relegated to playing catch up for the time being.

The strategy employed by Cake’s creators to closely emulate Rails is interesting, and I think it will pay off by way of helping to get early adopters on board. Looking to understand Cake concepts? Look at the much more complete Rails documentation.

That being said, given that tutorials for developing with Cake are sparse I’m thinking of lending a hand and delivering some additional documentation for the community. I truly do need 48 hours in the day.

Last week in Chicago, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to spend 3 days with Shelley Wood from InContext Enterprises.

InContext Enterprises was founded by Karen Holtzblatt and Hugh Beyer in 1992 to provide customer-centered design and consulting services. We use Contextual Design and our deep knowledge of how to transform customer data into innovative product concepts to design transformative solutions for our clients.

I was impressed with the contextual design process and with Shelley as a presenter. For an introduction to the methodology take a look at Hugh and Karen’s book Contextual Design : A Customer-Centered Approach to Systems Designs. If you are currently using an XP or Agile methodology, you may wish to look at Shelley’s companion book Rapid Contextual Design : A How-to Guide to Key Techniques for User-Centered Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies). I haven’t yet got my hands on the latter, but am looking forward to giving it a read.

Generally speaking, I see the contextual design process working very well with development teams already using XP (or modified XP) processes and am looking forward to integrating contextual design components into my best practices. If you are looking for a little more information – the folks at InContext released a paper recently called ‘An Agile Customer-Centered Method: Rapid Contextual Design’ which outlines how the Agile software development processes are a natural fit with contextual design.

One part of the CD process that struck me as particularily valuable and thought provoking was the Contextual Inquiry technique for understanding customer work practices.

I was excited to see the creation of the Metabrainz Foundation recently. A few years ago I spent a bit of time examining the MusicBrainz project while investigating semantic technologies (MusicBrainz utilizes RDF for its Web Services).

MusicBrainz is a community music metadatabase that attempts to create a comprehensive music information site.

Similar to Wikipedia, MusicBrainz is built by its legion of users. An important and open project – MusicBrainz is a foundation for building new music related applications.

Their board of directors consists of some people I’ve worked with in past and others that I read everyday. I’d urge you to donate a little something, just as I did yesterday.

Shelley Powers blogged a great post yesterday about her love of coding. It certainly reminded me of my own love of software creation – that exhilaration of turning an idea into a product or service.

When I think back to my childhood, I can see that I became addicted to that feeling very early in life. Shortly after receiving our first Atari computer – complete with tape drive – my brother and I used to create technology gadgets of the future out of paper, boxes and tape. From television watches to portable laptop printers – our juvenile creative output wasn’t too far off from what I see now everyday.

A few years later we’d spend hours each day typing in programs written in Basic, found in the latest issue of Nibble. In fact, I remember writing code in the back of my parent’s station wagon using paper and pen while on family vacation. I’d meticulously keep track of line numbers – waiting to get home so I could try running my latest ‘choose your own adventure’ game or home brew word processor.

I gained early exposure to the many phases of software development – tears fell when I once lost an entire essay in grade 7 because I chose to use my own word processor rather than the one that came with our Apple IIc. Turns out I had a bug with the save function – didn’t this thing pass QA? ;>

Today, as I’ve moved from one role to another in the software industry – one thing has certainly remained consistent – I love to build software, and I truly do love to create. Thanks to Shelley – today I’ve been once again reminded of the joy that comes with saying ‘I did this’.

I can’t say how much I enjoyed David St. Lawrence’s piece about working. He refers to it as ‘An unconventional guide to surviving corporate life.’, but I think the scope reaches far beyond that. For those of you who still believe that you’ll be retiring with the company you currently work for, look around at the new reality.

David states in the piece that he’s worked for over 25 companies during his career. While at first somewhat shocking, it is true that most of my friends and colleagues are on track for similar if not greater numbers. For most it is self driven, individuals looking for more challenge, pay or responsibility. They don’t need to work for so many different companies, but rather choose to.

The article at 149 pages isn’t a quick read, and even though there are some statements that I find exhibit over-the-top pessimism

Human Resources, contrary to your expectations, is not your friend. HR is there to protect the company and its executives against employees like you.

overall I am putting this article into my personal ‘must read’ collection.

ChangeThis, has quickly become one of my favorite sites for inspiration. A collection of manifestos submitted by people with ideas that inspire action, the site last week featured a manifesto by Craig of craiglist.

I’ve often wondered why software review sites like download.com do not offer screencasts of the various products they are reviewing. After all, in many cases the software producer is paying to have their software reviewed in a timely fashion (or ever at all). When I’ve paid $500 to get listed and reviewed, I’d often hoped for something more than a simple 4 X out of 5. If someone else doesn’t start to provide better consumer focused software reviews I might have to take on the task myself. Other than for reviews, screencasts are also starting to appear more frequently in blogs, Web help sites and instructional aides. Personally, my first screencast was created using RoboDemo which has since been aquired and rebranded by Macromedia. Now named Captivate, the product makes the creation of screencasts fast and easy. Instead of walking prospects through the same product demo over and over, I can create a screen recording complete with audio in about the same time it would take to deliver two such demos. Other tools do exist, and I’m going to try some of the alternatives in the near future. Screencasts are an effective method for communicating software-related behaviors and processes over the Web. Any company that is onboarding project members mid project would appreciate a library of screencasts to facilitate new staff in getting up to speed from a functional perspective. In this sense, many screencasts can be considered lightwieght CBT (Computer Based Training) modules.

Maria Schneider won a Grammy after releasing her album through the Web.

Forget local cable television, forget university radio. If you are looking to ‘make it big’ as an entertainer in the coming years, do it via the Web. The costs associated with streaming audio or video are no longer prohibitive, even for the new artist.

Flickr Graph is an application that explores the social relationships inside flickr.com.

I had been wanting to build a similar flash-based graph visualizer ever since building a FOAF social network visualizer on top of Touchgraph a few years ago. Although I love what Alex Shapiro has done with Touchgraph, and appreciate him sharing the source code so that I could provide the FOAF demo, I always wanted to see a flash based version in similar style. Marcos Weskamp delivers a stunning implementation with his Flickr Graph.

And what makes it all possible? Flickr’s REST style Web services of course.