Informal testing sessions on the street, in cafe's (also called guerrilla testing, ghetto testing,...) are a great and inexpensive way to get valuable feedback from potential customers of your software. I wrote about the topic before here.

One of my favourite websites last.fm is currently beta testing their next version and guess what they use guerilla testing to do so. Fortunately they also spread the work and write about it. So hop over to their blog and learn how they organize their testing sessions and how it works out for them.

Over at copyrighteous Benjamin wrote a nice post about how online stores could fill in the type of the credit card you are using automatically.

"Any decent credit card system knows that if a sixteen digit credit card number starts with 4, it's a Visa."

Actually some websites are already smart enough, e.g. shopify. However I would be interesting to know why not more websites are implementing a similar system like shopify has.

Once you start writing websites on a different platform than windows, you have to go the extra mile in order to access the Internet Explorer for compatibility reasons. Fortunately there is handy website which you can use to render your site with a variety of IE versions.

The service is called netrenderer and you can find it here. It is completely free of charge.

The OOPSLA 2007 podcasts have been available for quite a while, now. If you are interested in software engineering make sure to have a listen. I especially enjoyed Frederik Brooks talk on "Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design".

Get it here.

Writing software which you can modify easily is not an easy task. Over at InfoQ they have a nice video of a panel discussion which discusses this topic. Watch it here.

For me two things stood out:

1. You need a solid and clean design + automated testing if you want to be able to change your software later. While this should be obvious it is still not the case in our industry that all developers use and care about techniques like encapsulation, tell don't ask, dependency injection, unit testing,...
2. It is important that you do not make any premature decisions regarding your design. Always wait until the last possible moment for making a decision especially if this descision is hard to reverse. This rule can be applied not only to software but to every important descision which has to be made. For example Giuliani writes about this topic in his book Leadership.