I wrote a paper for XP 2007 about my experiences at the BBC as a Senior Product Owner for their systems that power their messageboards, community sites (like H2G2, Filmnetwork and 606) and the new comments engine for their blogs. I was fortunate to be one of the first at the BBC to manage a Scrum project in 2003 for ActionNetwork. As I got the handle of managing scrum teams I moved to being a Product Owner/Manager and found my niche. It was great to see the agile process from that perspective and how agile and the product creation process combine.
The paper is here - Making the whole product agile - a product owners perspective
posted by Dharmesh
Here are some of the 3D desktop plants that I created while at Adtools. The project was to make numerous 3D desktop plants that grew on your desktop. It had to be small filesize (< 100kb) and work without hardware acceleration.
I based my ideas from the book “The algorithmic beauty of plants” by Przemyslaw Prusinkiewicz. He uses Lindenmayer systems to create realistic models of plants. Implementing L-systems are not particularly difficult (in their basic form) but I also wanted to introduce the idea that the plants grow over time in a realistic way and also animate (like the growth of a snowdrop). In order to achieve this I needed to scale elements over time and change angles over time. I developed a parametric L-system model that allowed me to describe the plants. The parameters could then be applied on each timestep to increase the scale of a particular element or the angle. I also introduced different randomness factors.
Creating the rules to accurately describe a plant is somewhat complex, but it was possible to create extremely realistic models and animations. The models required a 3d artist to make the building blocks, like a leaf, branch bit, etc and the algorithms did the rest. We even made a christmas tree that had candles that lit up and had a christmas jingle.
The plan was to also allow the cross breeding of plants to produce variations into new executables and have multiple plants but ran out of time. However by changing angles, parameters, randomness and the mesh files you could get a large variation even without swapping parts of the rules. The valentines collection of roses had over a million downloads in a day.
Getting the filesize down was a challenge and optimising the system so that animations ran smoothly was really fun.
I can’t seem to find all the executables but here are a few to enjoy. They run on windows 95 through to Vista.
posted by Dharmesh
