There was some discussion on the Growstuff IRC channel last night, while I was asleep, about the term “spike”. I use it a bit on the Growstuff project but I don’t think everyone knows what I’m getting at, possibly because I picked it up by osmosis from the Extreme Programming community over a decade ago, and the term’s fallen out of favour since then. So here’s a quick definition as I use it: A spike is experimental. It’s for writing something you’ve never written before, Continue reading → The other week I posted from GUADEC, saying I’d been inspired to start an open source project to build a gardening website. If I posted, “I planted tomatoes in my garden in Melbourne on the 1st of November” and everyone else did likewise, we’d wind up with an extensive database of food plants, including things like heirloom varieties and where to source them from. We could also build a histogram of the distributions of planting times for every location. Eventually, we could build in tools Continue reading → It’s about time we went beyond “hey, knitting patterns are kind of like code” and looked more deeply at the kinds of technical skills that really make knitting like programming. Continue reading →