Thomas Ferris Nicolaisen's blog

Update 2011.05.09:  Arrowhead posted a reply to this post . This post is a tribute to a company which, judging by the looks of it, is kicking ass, agile style. "This sprint is really going down the drain" from the first scene of Magicka in adventure mode. What's this about The company is called Arrowhead Game Studios , and they've made a game called Magicka . Now, I'm not going to write so much about the game itself, but it's awesome. I used to play a lot of computer games growing up, all the way through my studies. Since then, it's been pretty sporadic. Until I tried out Magicka. I've been playing it for over 50 hours, which is pretty good value-for-money, considering it cost 10€ (plus DLC's, which are a point I'll come back to later). How successful is it? In the first 17 days it was for sale, it sold over 200.000 copies . At times it topped the stats for most-selling game on Steam , at one point selling 30.000 copies in 24 hour

Just jotting down some thoughts.. A couple of weeks ago, I drove up to Düsseldorf to attend the Scrumtisch Rhein/Ruhr meeting, because the topic was this new Agile/Lean Europe (ALE) Network . Olaf Lewitz facilitated the discussion ( credits to CodeCentric for the free beverages/food). I first heard about this network in this discussion in the Norwegian agile forum , initiated by  Sergey Dmitriev  and followed up on by Johannes Brodwall . Olaf and Deborah Preuss were both involved in the Agile Coach Camp in Norway earlier this year, and I suspect that they already discussed some of these things there. This makes for a firm connection between the German and Norwegian agile scene, and I hope to be able to support this bridge somehow. Now, why does this European interconnection matter anyway?  I'll give you three reasons why it matters to me personally: 1) It's no fun doing it alone Agile is deeply nested with social drive. While it's perfectly fine to drive on

Torbjørn Marø recently blogged about Dependency Injection, due to  Mark Seeman visiting the Norwegian .Net User Group in Bergen. This triggered my thinking about the dreaded Service Locator. I have worked with several teams that favored a home-made ServiceLocator class, a static component referencing a set of  services , typically chunks of functionality that are singletons that interact with something external like database, filesystem, or web-service. My beef with the Service Locator is that you can put it in, and use it from anywhere: It can be used to grab services in a controller/action component, inside a service, in a domain object, inside a for-loop, anywhere. This sounds pretty powerful, but ends up bringing in a lot of maintenance problems. Now, in spite of my troublesome experiences with it, I keep finding myself being pretty lousy at explaining the disadvantages of a ServiceLocator to my peers. I therefore hunted through Seeman's blog for some better explanati