soft.dev.etc

Hanno's web site. Comments, inquiries etc to hhinsch at yahoo dot com. Don't take it too seriously.

Managing software development projects

Adapting and extending best practices to solve the problem at hand.

• For at least the last 40 years, software development methodologists have been arguing about when and how to design software. Examining the principles motivating software design helps make sense of the conflicting camps and choosing the right alternative. See "Designing Software: When and Why"
• Strategically structuring a project is obviously important, but not much has been written about it. Given a long list of things that need to be done, how should that list be structured? What is the optimal order of tasks? On what basis do you decide what to do next? See "Structuring Software Development Projects"
• Process development and improvement is a lot like software development: Just incrementally fixing what's broken works pretty well. See "Improving Software Development Processes"

Bioinformatics

• Free download: JavaGene is a set of Java foundation classes for genomic sequence analysis that you can learn to use in an afternoon. It's good for doing low-level sequence manipulations -- just the thing when writing gene finders, analyzing gene structure, modeling molecular evolution and doing similar projects.
• Recurring genomic breaks in independent lineages support genomic fragility
  Hanno Hinsch and Sridhar Hannenhalli
  BMC Evolutionary Biology 2006, 6:90 (07 Nov 2006)
• Simple methods of finding short protein coding sequences using multiple species alignments
  Hanno Hinsch and Artemis Hatzigeorgiou
  Proceedings of BIOCOMP 06

Relics

• Time Planner Deluxe is a Personal Information Manager (PIM) for Windows, commercially released in the early nineties. It was bundled in some very large OEM contracts and also sold at retail as Key Project Manager. It combined project management features such as drag-and-drop Gantt charts, time and rate calculations, and a flexible system of folders, with the usual calendar functions.
• Telios is a full-featured commercial communications program for PC-DOS that I wrote in the eighties shortly after the original IBM PC was released. It implements full VT-100 emulation, Kermit, Z-modem, command files - all the features that an up-to-date comm package had to have back in 1983. It may even have been the first commercial implementation of the Kermit protocol.