Assembla Blog

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 27 Jan 2007 11:34:29 GMT

This article on Gamasutra provides a variety of “juicy” hints and examples from “4 Grad Students Who Made Over 50 Games in 1 Semester.”|

My last article on Hyper-agile product development focused on managing a complex project for minimum time to market – a sort of top-down approach for managers and teams. This article is a great follow-on for the individuals involved, a bottom-up approach to prototyping and testing individual features.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 20 May 2006 22:53:00 GMT

Jon Udell included me in his Friday podcast series this week with a conversation with Andy Singleton about building global teams . Jon has been putting up with me since 1993, when he edited some freelance articles that I wrote for Byte magazine. In 2003 he coined the term “dynamic development” to describe the work I was doing. He has recently been commenting on user innovation and the power of human networks to do work beyond open source sofware. In this conversation, he turns me on to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, and he cautions against a “walled garden”. Maybe we’ll be able to work together on a universally portable user profile.

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 20 May 2006 21:16:00 GMT

I have been reading a book called The Greek Commonwealth – Politics and Economics in Fifth Century Athens. Originally published in 1911, it’s not out of date. According to the author, “it is natural for human beings to enjoy using their own best faculties. Men never felt that enjoyment so keenly, or put so much high effort into its attainment, as in the workshops of ancient Greece. If you seek a proof, go look through the shelves of our Greek museums. There is hardly an object that they made, however rude, but bears on it, sometimes faintly, sometimes with speaking clearness, the touch of the spirit of Art.� How can we bring that spirit to our work, every day?

Posted by andy@assembla.com Sat, 15 Apr 2006 13:22:00 GMT

Less than a year ago I wrote an article titled “Is the Enterprise Software Licensing Business Dying�. It was originally posted on IT Managers Journal, but it got picked up by Slashdot and various bloggers and podcasters. It pointed out that enterprise buyers had stopped buying software licenses – the mainstay of the software industry. This caused years of misery for software professionals, years during which software was a bad business to be in. But the light at the end of the tunnel was apparent even then, in the form of new packaging and revenue models. Faster than I imagined, the prospects for the software industry have been transformed. We now have a wonderful alignment of good fundamentals – increasing demand, declining costs, and rapid innovation.

Posted by andy Tue, 23 Aug 2005 14:09:00 GMT

Houston, we have a problem. Innovation in aerospace stalled out and started losing altitude around 1970. Instead of jet packs and vacations on Mars, we have foam falling off the 30-year old space shuttle. Our life today isn’t anything like the twenty-first century life we imagined in …

Posted by andy@assembla.com Tue, 05 Jul 2005 17:43:00 GMT

User innovation, in the form of open source software, is one of the most powerful forces in the software business today. Will this force propel the software industry to yet another phase of bold innovation? Or, will it cripple commercial R&D organizations and lead to a future of stagnant, commoditized software?