Monday, March 24, 2008

Ward Cunningham and Wikis

Floss Weekly this week was a stormer! Ward Cunningham invented Wikis back in the early nineties whilst working on SmallTalk workstations at Tektronics (not their video test and measurement division!). The original C2 Wiki is still up and running and discussing agile development and extreme programming techniques. Ward makes the point that if you can't explain some point of technical development to your grandmother/bartender then you've over-complicated it. He is very humble and I enjoy listening to him speak.
In 2001 my chum Richard Drake was developing a commercial application for Wikis using his Clublets software. In fact I used clublets to run engineering at Resolution (that Wiki is still being served - but for how long, and how much is still there?). That particular engineering log has outlasted the company! Rik got me into the whole business and he knows Ward.

So, now we live in a Wikipedia world and everyone knows about Wikis - I'm still a fan and am trying to move this venerable blog over to one. I did mention it a couple of weeks ago and I've made some progress. Although the wiki isn't running on my Linux box yet I am staging it on Apache on that machine but the data lives on my wife's G4!
See the new colour scheme here.

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