Monday, July 4, 2005 - Mon, 4 Jul 2005

I was out of town for a few days for a family event and just got back tonight. I’ll respond to everybody’s e-mails tomorrow. I don’t think I’ve spent 4 days away from my computer in 5 years. It was a nice break, but its time to get back.

This phase of Behold’s development (finishing off the Everything Report) is taking a bit more time than I expected, but the result will be worth it. However, time is running out on the 3 month expiry of version 0.92. I’ll work to issue an interim release and make it available in the next few days.

While away, I bought and read the book: Extreme Programming Explored, by William Wake. I have been dedicated to the Feature Driven Development technique, but always wondered if Extreme Programming (XP) techniques might help me as well. I was a bit surprised by some of XP’s concepts. They have a test first and develop in small bits technique that I already try to follow. They do recommend working in pairs, which I alone obviously cannot do. They also separate the customer’s role from the programmer’s role from the manager’s role, whereas I also do all three tasks, but never thought of it that way. At any rate, there are some good ideas there that will help keep my development of Behold on track. These little boost-me-ups are always worthwhile.