Solve The Real Problem

First off, thanks to Tim Beck for being so generous as to grant Dave Benoit and me co-founder credit in the Pliant Alliance. If you've ever groaned at "capital-A" Agile software development, you'll want to head over and real the Pliant Alliance blog for some relief. And don't worry, you're not in for Yet Another Way To Do Everything lesson, or at least not a very long one. For example, this is my favourite entry from the FAQ:

How do I do Pliant Software Development?

Pliant Software Development is easy to implement. All you have to do is be willing to change the way you are doing software development if what you are doing now is not working for you.

Basically, the concept is so simple as to be boring:  "If what you're doing now works, keep doing it.  If not, do something else. " Your ancestors (at least as a whole population) used this principle quite successfully to come up with you.  Now you can use it to build software.  Huzzah.

I'll be posting musings about software development as *gasp* I actually develop some serious software. I mainly write professional single-threaded asynchronous C++ on POSIX (usually Linux) to do (soft) real-time servers, clients, networking, databases and whatever else needs to happen to get things done. So, expect to see commentary on such software based on my experience building real million-scale highly-available systems, much of which has also been with Dave Benoit (who will join me here soon).

We're working on some good stuff these days building up the kind of toolbox we've used previously to launch dozens of real, successful online services with the mothership. We're doing many of the "if I did this again, I'd have done it this way" kind of design without falling into the classic "Version 2.0" pit of dispair. We follow an evolutionary software development model where we own the same designs and code for years (and hopefully decades soon). We keep them up to date by growing and pruning the software with care over many years, so what we're building now is really "Iteration Step N", which means it comes with "all my lessons learned".