I recently had the opportunity to write a first draft for a web application allowing office workers to order hot and cold drinks online. It’s far from perfect, but gives an idea of how this problem can be approached! Introduction The aim of this document is to provide a first draft design for an online [...]
Reductionism could be viewed as an essential theoretical component of modern natural sciences such as biology or genetics. Although reductionist approaches work very well as long as “natural” phenomena are studied, things become more difficult when human beings are involved as the object of study. Let us try and see how this notion of reductionism [...]
Interactionism is a social scientific tradition that relies on the assumption that the “real” world is actively constructed by people: It therefore views the mind primarily as a tool for solving the “pragmatic concerns” of everyday life. Thus, the basis of all social life can be found in all the small interactions we conduct every [...]
I am currently working on a medium-size web development project for a public organisation: the project is implemented by a small, agile team of developers external to the organisation (rather talented I must say!) on the basis of specifications written by myself and my colleague. These specs mostly consist on word documents as well as [...]
I try and follow a few number of simple principles when I develop the front-end of enterprise web applications (that is to say web applications which aim is to support the processes of a particular organisation), both to inform design decisions and to avoid scope creep. The main approach I tend to follow and advocate [...]
In recent years, ‘software developers’ have traveled quite a distance in public imagination, from spotty-faced sociopathic nerds to geek chic alpha males. Some may want my head on a spike for such an appalling short cut, but one could argue that this change in the way software engineers are represented in cultural discourse may be [...]
How can we sum up what we do? what are these systems we design? Below is a somewhat simplistic and schematic view of the problem, which may have some merits in that it provides a framework within which we can start to tackle the particular issues of our beloved discipline in a ‘formal’ manner! I’ve [...]
I recently came across an interesting problem, which I guess is quite a common one for web application developers. I am currently working on a small to middle sized web application, and the development team is using Merb, a nice and neat MVC framework, and are making very good use of the ‘spirit’ and elegance [...]