Category: General

I recently saw an add for a “Universe Developer” on Craigslist. Some choice snippets (with my comments in italics): “Direct Hire position- NO Contractors” Only people in for the long haul need apply “Design and develop new universes and make modifications to existing universes.” This one sure could use some help, but new universes?! “Recommend…

Several years ago my wife and I got the chance to see Bo Diddley in concert here in Tampa. It was a great – if interesting – show. Being a musician and getting to hear greats like Bo, Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and B.B. King that have influenced not just you, but also the others…

Picture yourself on a warm beach – margarita (or Shirley Temple) in one hand, laptop in the other, test-driving the next big thing. That’s what life is like every day for those of us in the great Sunshine State. Or not. But we still have a lot to offer, and since many of the agile…

We’ve been creating several Java Beans that have an imperative need to have both equals and hashCode working correctly. To do this, we started off writing a series of test cases which made sure that for every field we exposed that the objects were / were not equal based on if the field was set,…

In a recent post I talked about being pretty disappointed with Serena Dimensions and its lack of strictly command line options. It appeared that no matter what you did, you still had to enter your credentials through the GUI pop-up box. After reading through the 380+page command-line reference, I’m happy to report that I was…

Recently I’ve been working on a project using Java and a technology called Gigaspaces. Being back in the Java world has been interesting, but thankfully many of the tools and approaches are similar. One aspect of our application (Ok, many, but we’ll pick one) is responsible for retrieving and storing information to a database. To…

Things are going to be interesting over the next couple of months. I guess that my new role is part of the architecture team. I’ve already had quite a rude awakening of how the industry has bastardized XP and Scrum (after somehow being sheltered by working in a great XP company, and then being onsite…

Before I joined my current job, they had just standardized on Serena Dimensions for the source control. In the past, I’ve used several different source control systems – CVS, Subversion, TFS, SourceSafe, etc. But I have never opened up a source control client and been utterly clueless as to how to get the files down….

I’m doing a bunch of things over the next couple of weeks with FitNesse and DbFit, so I’ll be posting tips and tricks from the stuff I’m doing. Today I had to calculate that a specific amount was updated in the database. Since I’m writing characterization tests, I can’t just modify the database to make…

Things have been kind of quiet on my front because of how crazy things have been at work. But in a good way. One of the things I’ve been doing is introducing FitNesse as an integral part of our strategy for capturing business rules and domain logic that isn’t really being captured anywhere. Currently I’m…