Category: General

A couple of cool going-ons over the next several weeks: On Monday, March 2nd, David J. Anderson will be in Tampa for one day. We’re going to do a get-together in the evening, so if you are interested, let me know via email (foyc at this blog) or on Twitter at cory_foy. David is putting…

In my overview post on this series, I used the term discipline, and still believe in that term. Some people commented that it may be confusing, since there are so many ways we think of and talk about discipline. The easiest way to explain it is with this awesome quote from The Fifth Discipline: The…

In my last post on discipline, I discuss disciplines as being the thing that kicks in when motivation fails you. More importantly, I state that there are specific disciplines which I believe apply across software developers wishing to be better at what they do. In doing research for this topic, I came across many references…

On Friday, I got the opportunity to attend the excellent acts_as_conference right here in Florida (over in Orlando). The conference is a one-track Ruby conference that had about 130 attendees show up. I was excited by both the schedule and the attendees, and though I was only able to attend on Friday, I wasn’t disappointed….

What does discipline mean to you? Looking at the definition from Merriam-Webster Dictionary, it could mean: punishment (obsolete) instruction a field of study training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character control gained by enforcing obedience or order orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior self-control a rule or system…

At the recent TDD Firestarter event here in Tampa, a second issue came up in the reviews – namely why we chose to use NUnit over MSTest (given that it was held in an Microsoft office). Several reasons came up – cost (MSTest requires Visual Studio Pro), integration (MSTest requires Visual Studio to be installed…

At the recent TDD Firestarter here in Tampa, a question came again that was a repeat of one from my TDD/MVC talk at Agile Tampa a couple of months back. Then, at the after-party of the Firestarter event, Joe Healy talked about needing a 10-step program for introducing TDD. I gave some thought to this,…

This past Saturday, I got the great pleasure of hanging out at the TDD Firestarter event here in Tampa. It was great fun, and I even got to wow the crowd with demos on FitNesse, Cucumber and DBPro. I also got some decent pictures of the crowd and activities. You can see what I’ve uploaded…

As more organizations have worked to implement agile practices, some teams have found wisdom in Lean Principles to guide them along. Some teams have even found ways to get rid of timeboxed iterations altogether and move towards Kanban – a pull based system for getting things done. If you’ve heard about Lean and Kanaban, or…

When my wife got an Touch several months back, the first thing I wanted to do was build some applications for it. Who wouldn’t want to play with a device that has accelerometers, position sensors and multi-touch gestures? But being new to the Mac world, I needed something to help guide me along. Beginning iPhone…