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Soapbox

Jesus does not influence the outcome of NFL games: After watching yet another miraculous Tim Tebow led comeback, I began to reconsider my stance that Jesus was not interested in the outcome of NFL games. There are two particular aspects about the Tebow phenomenon that I particularly enjoy. One is the obvious religious aspect. Although it isn’t the only factor, by far one of the largest aspects that drives the Tebow-haters, and drives them nuts, is the fact that Tebow is openly Christian, and unapologetic about it. These same people generally wouldn’t mind thuggish behavior in their athletes, or manslaughter convictions, or what have you, but an occasional mention of Jesus...; posted @ Sunday, December 11, 2011 7:45 PM | Feedback (2)

Repost: Relaxed attitude towards the pragmatic delivery of okay software: Rob Ashton has a post up about how he’s addressed his development of a current project. There’s tons to quote here: “…this time I made a real effort to drop any up-front 'zomg my code must be perfect' aspirations from the get go. What does this mean? Well I pretty much decided that technical debt should not be something to be overly avoided, overly organised code-bases stifle creativity and I really just wanted to deliver something.” “A couple of months later how does that leave me? Is the code-base a huge unmaintainable mess? I would say...; posted @ Wednesday, November 02, 2011 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Review: Tekpub Webcast - Full Throttle : TDD with Brad Wilson: So, after going through the signup process, I finally gained access to this episode. Leading up to this review, I have watched the episode in total 3 times: the first time I watched straight through while taking quick short hand notes, the second time, I watched portions of it in succession, stopping to take more in-depth notes, the third time, I watched it to fine-tune my comments on specific sections. Since I’ve been ragging on Tekpub, it is only fair to start off with a positive general note. Tekpub’s Production Quality Rob has been doing...; posted @ Tuesday, September 20, 2011 8:07 PM | Feedback (0)

Does anyone actually do TDD?: Obviously, the answer is yes. The person who first convinced me that “all that agile stuff” was really the direction to look towards (note, that’s “a direction to look towards”, not “embrace uncritically”, but I digress) practiced it. Or at least, he always had his NUnit test runner up, and I could tell when he was too busy to chat by looking at the status of his tests (when they were all green, I figured he was probably goofing off). I ask the rhetorical question though based on the lead to one of Rob’s posts: “One thing I've...; posted @ Sunday, August 21, 2011 8:06 PM | Feedback (2)

Software Development Troubleshooting Tip #2: When dealing with a large organization: This actually applies to migrations as well. I’ll leave ‘large organization’ vague…let’s make up a number and say if your entire software team (including developers, testers and support personnel) is greater than 20, it qualifies. I’ve seen some organizations do this well, and others…not so much. If you have a critical production issue, you should have two separate call lines, one dedicated to upper management, and the other dedicated to the people actually trying to fix the problem. One person should be available on both lines, all others should be kept separate. The reason for this...; posted @ Wednesday, August 10, 2011 8:14 PM | Feedback (0)

Why isn’t TFS more like <insert alternative here>? Blame Visual Studio: Brian Harry, the Product Unit Manager for Team Foundation, has a post about some of the coming improvements to TFS 11. It’s an interesting informational read for many reasons, but includes this: “A little background before I talk about the improvements we are making. When we designed TFS 2005, one of our design goals was to build a system that we could use for developing Visual Studio. VS is a VERY large code base. Last I checked, each branch was around 5 million files and I suspect it’s a good bit larger than that now. Your average developer needs...; posted @ Wednesday, August 03, 2011 7:58 PM | Feedback (0)

A sign you are working for an organization that doesn’t quite understand the Agile Manifesto: When there’s a slide that describes the process improvements they hope to implement and they list “going Agile” as being implemented in the “2013” timeframe.; posted @ Wednesday, August 03, 2011 7:40 PM | Feedback (0)

Software Development Principle: The Last Responsible Moment for dummies: Within the Agile development community, Chris Matts is well-known for discussing in great detail the concept of Real Options, and how it can be used to better software development. I’ll let you take a minute to look at the wikipedia post….yep, I don’t necessarily understand a lot of that either. I like to think that I’m at least vaguely intelligent, but there’s an intense level of background knowledge required to really understand what is described there. When it comes to software development, Chris and Olav Maassen have a decent InfoQ post that is a bit easier to understand. ...; posted @ Thursday, June 30, 2011 9:38 PM | Feedback (2)

Is RescueTime the new Pomodoro?: Scott Hanselman has posted about a tool called RescueTime that he uses to monitor personal productivity. Fine and dandy. Read his post. What I wonder is if this is just another version of Pomodoro, and as such, should be avoided like the plague. disclaimer: I’ve practiced Pomodoro in the past. In the context that I practiced it in, I actually thought it wasn’t that bad. Actually, it was, in the context I practiced it in, pretty decent. Once I thought about it a bit, I dropped it like the plague, but not because it wasn’t well thought out....; posted @ Thursday, June 16, 2011 8:19 PM | Feedback (0)

cqrs for dummies – an interlude – has it all been a waste of time?: Now that I have completed the long project that has sucked up a huge amount of time (which was necessary because it was important to the client, and because it pays the bills), I have returned much of my attention to one of my own projects, which might hopefully help pay some of the bills down the road and which involves an oddly opinionated version of CQRS. As it happens, Udi Dahan has written a post entitled “When to avoid CQRS” that suggests I shouldn’t be putting in the effort. Some of the key snippets here: “It looks...; posted @ Sunday, April 24, 2011 11:17 PM | Feedback (8)

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