Blue Sky On Mars

Thoughts on Building Software Products
January 4, 2005

ClearSilver built for Windows

by Kevin Dangoor

I don’t like make. There, I’ve said it.

But, of course, there’s always more to say. I like make plenty when I don’t personally have to work with makefiles. Typing “./configure ; make” is a fine process for building software. But, it wasn’t that easy when I was trying to build ClearSilver for Windows with Python 2.4. There are instructions that came in the ClearSilver tarball that got me part of the way. For some reason, though, the configure script just wasn’t getting my Python include and libs directories right. The simple solution was to just edit rules.mk to point to the correct directory, which worked just fine.

I’m quite thankful for the work that the MinGW people have put in. This kind of thing would be far harder without it.

2 comments
January 4, 2005

Micro Extreme Programming (Micro-XP)

by Kevin Dangoor

I had planned to write an article about using extreme programming (XP) within very small (1-3 person) teams. Luckily, I did a Google search first, and came up with
micro-eXtreme Programming ( µ XP): Embedding XP Within Standard Projects (PDF) by Frank Adrian of Symantec, so now I don’t have to.

Frank comes from the perspective that XP is good, but you can do a form of XP as an individual, even if the rest of your team is not doing it. The style that I’ve chosen to do is to work on 1 week iterations and standard XP-length stories, rather than Frank’s suggested “paragraphs”.

That’s the nice thing about development processes. You can always tailor them to your own specific needs.

1 comment