Thanks to Scott Bellware, I also consumed plenty of the Darth Vader goodness... Captivating stuff!
Q: How do you know your customer has become addicted to agile software development?
A: She says she can stop any time she wants.
David Anderson first blogged about gardeners and then attitudinals. The worst case is when you have a gardener with attitude.
To start with, Darrell set out to tackle contracts in agile development (and didn't fail to link to Mary's terrific list of resources on the topic!).
Mike Spille biled out loud about Martin Fowler repeatedly praising his staff at ThoughtWorks. Then again, who can blame the man for looking after his own well-being? Also, if you really buy the kind of crap that "we only employ top-notch professionals" from a consulting company with thousands of employees, you've already lost a marble or two...
On the tools & technology front, Grig enlightened us with a tooltip and Charles posted a handy tip I just had to bookmark just in case I'll have to use JBoss some day.
Remember earlier when I said that the summer is coming?
Clarke blogs about playing out his thoughts with the characters he's got in his book. That makes perfect sense. There's a lot of learning happening every time I start doing something that I'm not intimately familiar with (as in "it's all coming from my spinal") and often the biggest learnings are indeed those that happen 14 hours after the fact, sitting in a bus, looking at a dog that's waiting for its master outside a grocery store. Or something. I'm talking about stuff that hits you when you've taken a step back and looking at the situation from outside ("from the balcony", as they say in Getting Past No).
I will try to employ the same technique more or less consciously for some of my stuff as well, when I get to that part. Isn't it nice when I'm so vague :)
Oh, and Clarke, it's all fine and dandy that you play out your conversations with Steve and Co. as long as you don't actually start talking to them ;)
I'm writing a book. More on that later. Can't spill the beans quite yet ;)
Just something I spotted from one of the feeds I'm subscribed to:
The Dangerous Hacker
By the way, are you coming to the Scrum training Jens and Boris are doing in May right here in Helsinki? Consider registering before it's too late. I mean, it's not like they'll be here every week...
I just spotted a new Microsoft website, Coding4Fun, which sports a section on game development. Following a couple of interesting-looking links, I also found out that they have a bunch of webcasts on game development.
Nice. Although I know I won't have the time to actually read/watch all those resources, I'm probably going to at least take a peek every now and then...
Rachel's photos reminded me that I had taken a couple of shots of our whiteboard at work. I decided to post them after the mandatory touch-up to protect the guilty:
Summer is coming. And I love it.
Every now and then, I take a look at this blog's referral logs and learn something new about the Internet community. For example, just today, I learned that my blog is the first hit for the Google search "lasse brown body love photos". Now I'm not going to pretend that I wouldn't have one of the best "bods" in the world (I trust that you know that's not the case), but I have to wonder who on earth has typed in that query? And what was it about my blog's description in the search results that made that someone click the link? I suppose I'll never know for sure.
Scott Bellware found a bug in ReSharper. And an interesting bug at that. I wonder if there's a line of C# somewhere in ReSharper's code base that says
private string methodName = "A";
...
Ok. Enough of that .NET stuff. Get your daily WTF from here (thanks Clarke). Oh, and talking about conferences, you might want to check this out, too.
Finally, (before I get my coat and head out to the other side of the city to bake muffins -- yeah, those big and tasty chocolate ones!) who knows, maybe in a couple of years, Microsoft is also on rails (just keep on reading and you'll get my idiotic humour (at least it's a good blog entry (not that I would expect any less from David))).
I just bumped into a sourceforge project named jRSVP, which is a Rapid Serial Visual Presentation reader for PDF, PS, HTML, Unix man pages and TeX DVI documents, implemented in Java. This was the first time I heard of RSVP. Assuming reading this blog entry is the first time for many of you as well, here's a quote from the jRSVP website that explains what RSVP is about:
RSVP is based on the notion of displaying a text one word at a time. The words are displayed very quickly after one another. This supresses the eyes tendency to backtrack the line while reading, searching for the end of the sentence as well as the reader's tendency to oralize the text while reading. This significantly increases the reading speed.
Try it. It's a rather, umm, different way of reading an e-book... Definitely better suited for reading texts in your native language ;)
Damn you folks at TextDrive, Odeo and company! And you, Dave, of all people. I thought you guys cared about my well-being? Don't you people realize that I'm supposed to have a life outside all of this geek stuff? Apparently not, since you're effectively forcing me to stay awake for a full 24 hours coding Ruby :)
Someone pointed me to an interview of Kent Beck in which Kent slips that he's been working on a new JUnit release together with Erich Gamma:
"Erich Gamma and I are working on a new JUnit release that will mark its first significant architectural changes since JUnit was very young."
Great news for us Java types!
Elsewhere, since Simon blogged about his project blogs again, I'm bound to get a bunch of requests for the ancient blog posts about the CruiseControl WeblogPublisher... It's always like that when Simon links to some old post that links to an older post that links to my blog :)
Jason Yip spotted a nice quote from Steve Farber:
Here's the problem: many people who call themselves leaders are only posing. They're wearing the label or accepting the title without putting their skin in the game. So I'm asking you -- assuming that you really do aspire to lead -- to approach the act of leadership as you'd approach an extreme sport: learn to love the fear and exhilaration that naturally comes with the territory. And that takes a personal commitment and a significant, personal choice.
Actually, I would've picked another paragraph to quote -- which conveys the same message slightly more, eh, "effectively":
There are many people who think they want to be matadors, only to find themselves in the ring with two thousand pounds of bull bearing down on them, and then discover that what they really wanted was to wear tight pants and hear the crowd roar.
Heh. I just found a "draft" blog entry that I had never actually posted. After a moment of consideration, I decided to post it. I may regret this, but here goes:
Reading blog entries like this one from Johannes Kohl make me realize how different all the projects around me could be if they had professional testers. By professional, I mean someone dedicated to improve his profession and practice instead of the usual "I won't do [beep] before you've finalized and reviewed all of the test cases you yourself have written for me because I have no [beep] idea how to do my job properly, and no way I'm going to learn how to automate tests because I fear that they'll replace me, the badly trained monkey that I am, and I have absolutely no potential whatsoever to learn anything new".
Just venting a bit. Can you tell I'm somewhat frustrated?
They call it Castle on Rails. It will be interesting to see whether this will fly on a static typing-based platform (referring to C#).
Although I have to say this one has a new twist on it :)
Jeffrey Palermo (via Scott Bellware) blogs about having imported some Java library for use with his .NET application. While succeeding in doing that must've felt pretty good, I can't help but note that apparently this JBimp tool he uses only supports Java 1.1 (which is, like, so last millenium).
In my opinion, a better example of cross-language/platform interoperability/reuse would be Eric Sink's story (via Steve Eichert) about SourceGear wanting to create an Eclipse plugin.
I have been rather silent lately. One of the reasons being that I was abroad for a couple of weeks. More details later on.
Anyway, I've slowly picked up my blogroll again and found a lot of intriguing blog entries/articles that I recommend you to read as well:
- Andy Hunt of the Pragmatic Programmers has posted an article describing a rather uncommon software project involving a dead man and a piano. No silver bullets or anything but a pretty interesting story and it made me think about how some people have vastly different testing problems to face than most of us J2EE/.NET/PHP/etc types.
- Elsewhere, Jim Shore and Chris Wheeler have blogged about units of estimating. Well worth reading. Makes you second-guess your own current practice, which is a good thing to do every once in a while.
- Brian Marick, the testing guy, has blogged about introducing Agile to a legacy project. He's making a couple of points explicit that should be common sense but aren't.
- Finally, (and this is only useful to you if you're into learning Ruby and if you are then you probably know about this already, but...) Mike Clark has posted the second part of his voyage to learning Ruby through tests.
Yes, you read it correctly. And you can win a PlayStation Portable as well ;)
Steve Eichert responds to Darrell's recent blog entry, "How to fix the software development industry", with an alternative target: how software and consulting companies reward their best geeks by not letting them do what they do best and instead pushing them towards leadership positions.
While I certainly know what Steve's talking about, personally I consider it a far more worse problem that there are lots of companies out there that are happy keeping their geeks right where they are, without rewarding them at all (well, beyond a pat in the back), until the geek decides to finally shift gear and move on. And then the company brings in a new geek, or two, and the cycle begins again.
Okay. While I thought Cenqua's recent product launch was something spectacular and bound to improve the productivity of software developers at least ten-fold, Opera's latest patent-pending innovation called Opera SoundWave is an even bigger discovery!
I'm pretty sure I've blogged about Dave and Andy having some pretty fancy tools deployed for their publishing -- where all authors are working on text files against a CVS and a new version of the book is rendered/formatted automatically, the code snippets are included from external files, etc. Pretty fancy stuff indeed, compared to the Microsoft Word approach probably used by most other publishers.
Anyway, Dave has posted some details on their toolset.
Some of the code is even executed during the build process:
<code language="ruby">
<run saying="This outputs">
Dave
says
</run>
a = gets
b = gets
puts a + " " + b
</code>
Nice.
I've been catching up on interesting-looking threads from the XP book discussion group at Yahoo! and caught something I wanted to share -- a quote from Laurent Bossavit:
We were about 250km from our destination, it was past 6pm and we needed to be there at 8pm.
- "Well, we're not late *yet*, are we?"
- "Oh no, we'll certainly catch up."
We laughed but it wasn't totally funny.
On a road trip, you know that you'll be late quite a while *before* the time you're supposed to show up at your destination. People know this, they do the calculations involved almost without thinking; it's a matter of common sense.
For some reason that common sense vanishes between getting out of the car and getting into the office.
Here's a pretty good article by Evan Robinson about the forces in action during a crunch.