Monday Links - Week 236

How do you build the right thing?

This is a collection of essays from ThoughtWorks designers who are finding ways to successfully blend together agile development practices with user-centred design [note: you have to give them your email address to download it] — JM

London cycling campaign

Both Chris and I have witnessed cyclists being hit by other vehicles this past week. While the accident I saw just resulted in bumps and bruises, Chris had the misfortune to be nearby when a cyclist was killed. The London cycling campaign are working towards making the streets safer for London’s ever growing number of cyclists. I believe they deserve our support. — TW

What is Programmer Anarchy and does it have a future?

This is an outsider’s impressions of how Fred George’s post-agile Programmer Anarchy works at Forward. I don’t agree with the author’s conclusion that “any kind of team will always need a division of labour, a leadership structure to organize and motivate the team”, but it was an interesting read none-the-less. — JM

How I Earned A Lot More on Projects by Changing My Pricing Strategy

Although I’ve never been convinced that fixing a price for a project up-front is a good idea for either party, I think there are some interesting ideas in this article e.g. “value-based pricing” and “positioning the price as an investment, not an expense”. — JM

MVCli

One of the projects that I heard about at Lone Star Ruby Conference, it’s basically a “Rails for CLI applications”. If the description is accurate it sounds suspiciously like over-engineering to me, and the README is unhelpfully empty, but maybe one of you could check it out and let me know if there’s a spark of something interesting there? — JA

PairProgramWith.me

Another of the strong themes at LSRC was pair programming, and in particular remote pair programming. This site was promoted by Avdi Grimm in his closing keynote, but I also met Mark Simm who spoke about #pairwithme. I’m hoping to make some time available soon to pair with new people. — JA