Hi, I'm Benedikt Deicke. I'm a web and software developer at flinc. I'm mainly building user focused web applications using Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. Additionally I'm currently finishing my studies for my master's degree and enjoying photography in my spare time. Feel free to get in touch with me!

May 2nd, 2007
Visited Hamburg

I’ve been visiting Hamburg for two days (Sunday and Monday) lately. It was great. It’s been a while since I last visited the city. (I think it must be about four years or something) Surprisingly not much changed, at least the at the places I visited again. I’ve also had the chance to meet Christian, with whom I’m working on nightwish.com for some time now. Together we went to see, among others, Tarot at the Earthshaker Roadshock. I really enjoyed it. The venue (Markthalle) was quite small but yet very nice (okay … the air conditioning sucked) and the bands rocked the stage. Can’t wait to get there again. :-)

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April 10th, 2007
Microsoft is Dead

I just finished reading this article by Paul Graham. It’s quite interesting so take a look at it!

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April 6th, 2007
Keyboard cleaning

I cleaned my keyboard today … disassembled it completely. Every single key has been brushed and cleaned. It’s like new again! I should do that more regularly as it was quite dirty. How long ago did YOU clean your keyboard? ;-)

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March 14th, 2007
Traveling

While traveling by train last friday I noticed this (german) advertisment at the station in front of a bakery. Click here for a bigger picture. Later, in the train, I was sitting next to a guy with a very old and very huge notebook. I didn’t know people are still able to use those slow boxes ;-)

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March 8th, 2007
Agile Development

Since a few months I’m working on a project at university. We are creating a browser-based whiteboard-like collaboration plattform called ‘EduCs’. The university told us to use the waterfall approach. We spent the whole last term creating documents and just finished the design-phase about two weeks ago. I already hated it shortly after we started and looked for alternatives. Thanks to Rails I got to know ‘Agile Development’. (We had a lecture about software engineering which never mentioned it).

Since then I’ve been reading books, watching talks and listening to Chaosradio a lot. Agile Development seems to fit my feeling about how to do software. As I’ve to do an internship in about one year to get my bachelor degree, I’ve started to look out for companies using agile methods. I didn’t expect it to be this hard. I’ve been asking some of my friends how the projects are done in their companies. Shockingly most of them told me that their not even doing the waterfall approach or anything similar. Only one told me – while working on a half finished website, that was going to be released the next day – they had a whole bunch of people solely managing and organizing the projects.

Why is this? Are there so few companies caring about how they do their software or do I just know the “wrong” people?

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