Eli White gave a talk called “The Knight Rider Methodology to Software Development”.

He compares software development methodologies to the old TV show Knight Rider, in that the main character, Michael Knight, was average and ordinary except for the fact that he had an applicable toolset for what he needed to do (KITT).

Eli talks about how while locking yourself into a programming language (company wise) is okay in that when you hire you know that the candidate has to know at lease a finite number of languages. But you shouldn’t force employees to use locked in tools. If they like their own editor debugger combo, let them use it because they will be faster, the code will still work the same.

He goes over different tools you’ll use for different purposes. Editors, debuggers, load testers, etc.

The movie clips are great, which you unfortunately don’t get on the downloadable presentation.