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I’ve recently discovered that I favor blocks over playsets. I’m talking about toys, and of course the canonical example of blocks is Legos. You can build nearly anything with them. They are useful, versatile, and inviting. Now, the term ‘playset’ warrants a bit more explanation...
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I’m two weeks shy of six months at Microsoft. When I arrived here I was immediately thrown into the fray on Project Silk . The primary developer on the project was heading into paternity leave. Fortunately, I had read JavaScript: The Good Parts on my flight out to Redmond. (I had no idea that I’d be...
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We live in a world where thoughts and concepts are not getting smaller and simpler but rather they are getting larger and more complicated. Software teams in many cases are no longer all crammed into one room or can be fed by 2 boxes of pizza (which is a large systemic issue in my opinion). Teams are...
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Chapter XXXVI My time with Blue Spire has officially ended. I have accepted a position with Microsoft on the Patterns & Practices team. My start date is April 18th. Even though I’ve been professionally restless for a while, leaving Blue Spire turned out to be rather emotional for me. Untangling myself...
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On March 31, 1998, around 10am, my then-manager Alex and I left the office we shared together and headed over to Electronics Boutique. Alex and I were both developers working for the IT department of an up and coming software company called PC DOCS. In those days, we didn’t have a corporate firewall...
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I didn’t intend to purchase a Kinect for some time. However, there I was, walking reluctantly through Stuffmart, picking up a few random items for my home office. My four year old son, Ranen, had accompanied me. I was digging through various audio connectors when Ranen stopped and said “Daddy! It’s that...
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James Senior posted on his Twitter account : “oh dear lord no. why intel, why? http://ow.ly/2s2dm reminds me of when Intel got into the hosting business. http://ow.ly/2s2fT ” James is referencing an article posted by the BBC on the recent news of Intel’s takeover of McAfee for 7.68 Billion. While I agree...
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Much ado has been made of these few words in Apple’s iPhone SDK: "Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS...
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Today I was having a conversation with one of the developers on my team (btw, this guy is going to be a rock star) and I made that statement to him that I thought we had some noisy code. The context around this conversation was with our usage of AutoMapper (which I love so DO NOT take this as a...
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Now before you write off this post as being ‘just another silly request’ hear me out. Right now in C# we can do the following switch( someObject ) { case Option1: case Option2: case Option3: // do something break; case Option4: // do something break: } Allowing fall through for a switch statement is...
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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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Many months ago I wrote a letter to upper management about principles of software development and the ways in which should build software. Since that time my role has changed within the company and for the first time in my career I’m managing a significant number of people (at a previous company...
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It does not take a genius to realize that I (and most others on this blog) are fans of JetBrains . But what it may take a genius to realize is it takes balls to do what JetBrains does with their products. You may be asking what exactly I am talking about or referring to? I am taking...
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Over the weekend I was having a conversation with my wife and we were not communicating on the same wave length. After a few minutes of talking in circles it dawned on us that we had not established the context around the conversation and we had no real understanding of what either of us was saying...
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So the fires continue to burn, as Joel Spolsky’s internet access hasn’t been disconnected. For someone who is supposed to be an idiot and irrelevant, a lot of people still read and link to him. I guess one guy is corrupting all the new developers, who are assumed to be reading Joel’s...