synatic|blog by Benedikt Deicke

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?

Today I modified Mephisto’s default theme. It’s a little bit more individual and synatic|net related now. Hopefully you like it ;-)

Nevertheless I could still need someone with professional webdesign-skills who knows XHTML, CSS like his/her own pocket. Maybe one of my few (future) readers out there matches these criterias? If yes, and you’re interessted in a cooperation please contact me! :-)

I’ve tried it before, but never continued for more than 2 weeks: running a blog.

I just wrote my last exam for this term about an hour ago so I’ve got some time to spend. I’m planning to write about my current side-projects (mainly webapps/websites), linux, programming, software development and anything else related to computers. You won’t read much about my personal life (it’s kind of boring anyways). I’ll try to run this blog in english language … well … my english surely isn’t the best but let’s see this as a possibilty to improve it. Please don’t hesitate to correct me ;-)

So, here we go …

I’ve started playing around with Ruby On Rails last year and started developing my first “big thing” for one of my customers. It’s planned to release a first version in a view weeks. It’s going to be a lot of work but I’ve nothing else to do during my semester break. Okay, maybe doing a new design for this blog … ;-)