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This past Saturday I had an early morning coffee with a friend. He’s an entrepreneurial type – a big thinker who moves at a fast pace and is always thinking ahead. One question he asked of me, “Are you playing checkers or chess?”. The question was asked around business and career but I could not...
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I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . As the title suggests, it deals with certain fundamental differences in the way we see the world and how that affects our political views. Don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into politics in the...
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This past week I was taking a look at one of our build scripts as it appeared to be taking a bit longer than everyone wanted. Because I am very close to the file (authored about 50% of it) I decided that in place of just diving in and looking at the raw source I would instead run the script with the...
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If your application needs extension points what do you do? Building a plugin based system is not cutting edge, it is not rocket science. However, it does take a little effort and can be a bit painful depending on your implementation. The guys at MS (Glen Block and crew) has been working on...
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FuncWorks, LLC ’s first XNA game, IncaBlocks , is now available on Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG)! This game represents the many hours and weekends Dylan , Cicelie and myself worked the past several months. Looking back at SVN, I started this as a side project to ROCS around July 30th. Shortly thereafter...
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I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
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The blogosphere has gone a bit crazy the last few days with posts responding to Joel Spolsky’s latest article about "The Duct Tape Programmer" . Bloggers everywhere are tossing their two cents in and saying what parts of Joel's post was good and what wasn't good. Once noticeable trend...
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Joel , in his inimitable way, posted the flame bait of all flame bait posts yesterday , explaining the role of the Duct Tape Programmer. To my surprise, the Twitterverse started to reverberate with commentary, but weirdly, almost all of it was very negative about the post, many claiming that Joel was...
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Things I’ve said in a session before: “Friends don’t let friends ORM” “ORM is a pattern, not a framework” “I like typed datasets, and I cannot lie” It’s not that I’m anti-ORM, or believe popular ones like NHibernate, Linq2Sql, and EF are useless...
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If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...
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Today I was asked what I thought about asking each of our feature teams to report the total number of new unit tests created during their iteration. My knee-jerk reaction was to ask the person WTF were they thinking. However, my better sense (yea, I have a little common sense) kicked in....
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After my recent post about our software team moving to Kanban I got an email from Derick Bailey asking how he could help with our transition. Derick graciously offered to meet with our team and help with any questions we may have and provide guidance as someone who has traveled this path before. We met...
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Working with people is a lot like working with code. New relationships are green fields. Over time they become brown fields and (just like code) they require maintenance. I’m sure that everyone reading this can identify some legacy relationships that they would describer as, well, complicated. Just like...
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Several months ago our software team decided to dive into the Scrum process. What we were doing before that simply wasn't working. The project had unstable delivery dates and we knew something needed to change. Fast forward about four months and we're going to take a shot at using Kanban and...
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I yearn to be consistent. I want my professional values to be the same as my personal ones. This is why I was quick to sign the Agile Manifesto ; it aligned with my personal values. I have been overcommitted for the last couple of months and the stress has forced me to do some professional reevaluation...