Agile Fuss continued

Dan North, at QCon last year: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Keeping-Agile-Agile

Re: Craftsmanship Movement Pros and Cons

It took a bit longer than I expected, but finally Robert Martin responds: http://thecleancoder.blogspot.com/2011/01/software-craftsmanship-what-it-all.html

Alfresco 3.4 Installers

If you've installed an Alfresco 3.4 distribution, you may've noticed that unlike the previous versions, Alfresco doesn't offer anymore Tomcat bundles, only full-blown installers - which I personally hate.

However, it seems that using the new installers, you can still get a similar setup to the old Tomcat bundles. Have a look at http://richard.esplins.org/siwi/2011/01/12/automating-new-alfresco-installers for  a full description of how to achieve this.

Craftsmanship Movement Pros and Cons

Dan North has a good post about why, in his view, programming is not a craft: http://dannorth.net/2011/01/11/programming-is-not-a-craft/

I wonder how long before uncle Bob responds.

Monitoring overview

Good article describing the different levels of infrastructure monitoring: http://www.paperplanes.de/2011/1/5/the_virtues_of_monitoring.html

Scrumming your Wedding

Well, it seems people are such Scrum fanatics now-a-days, that they show you how to plan your wedding using Scrum. Check this video out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOiQAYeJF_o&feature=player_embedded

Probably the next books will be about planning your life using Scrum. Funny how no one looks back at history and tries to learn from it.

Tools of the Trade

Don't use a tool unless you understand it (to be read as: don't use a framework unless you know its purpose). I'm getting tired of the amount of people who are using web frameworks just because they read about them in blogs. Try mixing Seam with JSF in an ungly way and see what happens....

And while we're at it, don't use unstable 3rd party libraries in your production code, just because you want to be on the "bleeding edge" of software development.