"Post-PC Computing" Is Not a Vision
Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses the various computing eras and the change we are currently going through, leaving the PC era and entering a new one characterized by mobility, clouds, HTML and content.
Allen Wirfs-Brock discusses the various computing eras and the change we are currently going through, leaving the PC era and entering a new one characterized by mobility, clouds, HTML and content.
Michael Cote, aka RedMonk, has provided an audio recording of Miguel de Icaza’s keynote at Monospace. Miguel talked about Mono’s history, some plans for the future, Silverlight, and he gave a demo of building a Linux appliance.
40 years after the NATO Conference on Software Engineering, Tom DeMarco paused to reflect on the discipline's evolution, wondering whether the metrics orientation he championed has distracted from the real point of computing: "transformation, creating software that changes the world." Is his earlier advice valid, though? "No", he said, in Software Engineering: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone?

Laurent Bossavit discusses the importance of learning from history and reflects on the historical influences that have contributed to emergence of agile practices and techniques. He examines the impact agile approaches are having and the emergence of the new discipline of agile software development, and calls for formulation of a new generation of more inclusive Agile institutions.

In this article, Wil Leeuwis explores lessons that can be learned from a historical perspective when thinking about SOA. He argues there's a lot of old, well understood and practically applied theory that can help us harvesting the profits of the innovation part of the services-world.
Neal Gafter reviews the long history of Java from its inception to the present and makes an incursion into what he thinks will be a great future and guessing what might come in Java SE 9+ after 2014.

Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding recall the events leading to Erlang and its later evolution. They mention the Prolog interpreter, JAM, VEE, Strand88, OTP, TEAM, BEAM, and other technologies.

Scrum creator Jeff Sutherland guesses there are 120,000 Scrum teams holding standup meetings on any given working day. But how many are really doing Scrum? At QCon London 2007 he talked about "the Nokia test" which he likes to use to distinguish whether teams are doing Agile or only iterative process - or neither! He also revealed the connection between Scrum and the Mars robots.

Noted Ruby community leader and author David Black puts the success of Ruby and the growth of its community in historical perspective, why Matz is an optimal custodian for the language, and the overall success of Ruby and Rails and related conferences. We also discuss David's book Ruby for Rails, and why it's needed at this time by the Rails community.