June 2018 – Page 3 – ACCU World of Code

Many of you are reading this because you signed-up for a free copy of my Xanpan book.

Thank you so much! – I hope you are enjoying my thoughts, reflections and tips.

Now, can I ask a favour, please? – a few minutes of your time.

If you have a copy of Xanpan would you mind writing me an Amazon review? (thats .com, Amazon UK has a separate list of reviews – yes, it is a pain).

Please, please, please

Amazon reviews make a big difference to sales and Iâ€™d be most grateful. (Even more so for 5-star reviews!)

And I will happily give a free review copy of â€œLittle Book of Requirements and User Storiesâ€ to anyone who would like to review that book too – mail me, allan@allankelly.net. (And if you already have a copy of Little Book please suggest some other way I can thank you for your review.)

Iâ€™m also working on getting Continuous Digital and Project Myopia onto Amazon. Both will get new professional covers and a proper copy edit

Finally, as some of you know, Iâ€™ve started writing a companion to Little Book: Product Ownership. Again Iâ€™m using the LeadPub system so you can buy the book now and get free updates as I add to the book and edit it. And I am most grateful to those of you who have already bought Product Ownership.

The post Free books and other news appeared first on Allan Kelly Associates.

June 3, 2018

Clever Things People Do In Groovy So You Have To Know About Them video

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

Groovy has lots of interesting syntax that can be used for domain-specific languages, such as Gradle build files, and Jenkinsfiles. I try to demystify the syntax tricks a bit so you have a chance to read and understand what the code is actually doing:

Slides and source code are available.

June 2, 2018

EDG and Github are both logical purchases for Microsoft

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

It looks like my prediction that Microsoft buys Github may be about to come true.

Microsoft has been sluggish in integrating their LinkedIn purchase into their identity management system. Lots of sites have verify identity using Github options (or at least the kind of sites I visit do), so perhaps LinkedIn identity will be trialed via Github.

A Github purchase will also allow Microsoft to directly connect lots of developers to Azure. Being able to easily build and execute Github code on Azure is the bait, customer data is where the money is; making Github more data friendly is an obvious first priority for new owners.

Who else should Microsoft buy? As a protective move, I think they should snap up Edison Design Group (EDG) before somebody else does. Readers outside of the compiler/static analysis/C++ standards world are unlikely to have heard of EDG. They sell C/C++ front ends (plus other languages) that support all the historical features/warts supported by other C/C++ compilers. The features only found in Microsoft’s compilers is what make it very costly/time-consuming for many companies to port their applications to other platforms; developer use of Microsoft compiler dependent features is a moat that makes it difficult for many companies to leave the Microsoft ecosystem. EDG have been in the business a long time and have built up an extensive knowledge of vendor specific compiler features; the kind of knowledge that can only be obtained by having customers tell you what language constructs they are using that your current product does not handle (and what those constructs actually mean).

What would happen if a very large company bought EDG, and open sourced its code (to make it easier for Windows developers to switch platforms, not to make any money off compiler related tools)? Somebody would have to bolt on a back-end, to generate code; but that would not be hard (EDG have designed their product to make this easy). A freely available compiler, supporting all/most of the foibles of the Microsoft C++ compiler, would tempt many Windows only developers to give it a go. A free compiler removes management from the loop, developers can try things out as a side project, without having to get management approval to spend money on a compiler (from practical experience I know how hard it is to sell compatible compiler products, i.e., there is no real money to be made by anybody doing this commercially).

Is this risk, to Microsoft, really worth the (relatively) low cost of buying EDG? The EDG guys are not getting any younger, why wouldn’t they be willing sell?

June 1, 2018June 1, 2018

Chalk The Lines – a.k.

a.k. from thus spake a.k.

Given a set of points (x_i,y_i), a common problem in numerical analysis is trying to estimate values of y for values of x that aren't in the set. The simplest scheme is linear interpolation, which connects points with consecutive values of x with straight lines and then uses them to calculate values of y for values of x that lie between those of their endpoints.
On the face of it implementing this would seem to be a pretty trivial business, but doing so both accurately and efficiently is a surprisingly tricky affair, as we shall see in this post.