On studying programming and programmers

In university, we do a lot of waterfall in courses with project work. It isn’t the kind of thing a student would do (to) themselves, so professors feel obligated to give us that experience in class. Research shows that both business and recent graduates wish they’d been taught agile development methodologies in university and college, but course content always lags behind.

At Pythian, we used a mostly-Scrum methodology, with all the benefits and challenges that entails.

Consistency and direction in pagination

Today, I discovered yet again one of the cardinal sins of user interface design – inconsistency. A blog had two pagination interfaces on one page - and they had opposite directionality. For one, older posts were to the left; for the other, older posts were to the right. This is an obvious and egregious error, and the solution is to make them operate in the same direction, or better yet, remove one.