Category: General

So I’ve made it to Seattle (well Bellevue at least) to start my orientation with Microsoft. This afternoon 3 of us on the PFE team met up at the airport to carpool together. We ended up heading to a great place called the Crab Pot, and had the waitress dump a big ol’ pot of…

In Lean Software Development, Tom and Mary Poppendieck discuss the story of the Freemont, California GM plant which was completely turned around in a joint venture between Toyota and GM. Toyota ran the plant, but rehired the GM workers that had been working there before the plant closed down. GM has not been able to…

It’s been a long week, but we are finally moved into the house. The movers came yesterday and dropped all of our stuff off. We’ve worked like mad today to get everything unpacked – so far we’ve gotten the kitchen and living room, and the basics in the office and bedrooms unpacked. I wish I…

It’s been a fun ride here in Columbia, MO. It’s a great town, with great people, good weather (except for tornadoes), and a great company. But tomorrow morning the packers are coming to move us back to Tampa for my new job with Microsoft, so it’s good bye to Columbia, and internet connection for a…

Two powerful tools for communicating requirements from your customers, and testing those requirements, are Fitnesse and Selenium. Fitnesse, a wiki encapsulating the Framework for Integration Tests (aka FIT), enables customers to write sentence-like tests which can be mapped to the underlying system. Selenium drives a browser without all of the fragile mouse coordinate testing you…

My pair and I searched around and around today for this problem. We have an object whose definition comes from one table, but has one or two fields that need to come from a joined table. Something like: TableSecurity ( int userId, varchar username, varchar password, bit isActive )TableUser ( int userId, bit isPreferred )…

At tomorrow’s (September 14th, 2006) Agile Carolinas meeting, Arlen Bankston will lead a discussion on Lean, Six Sigma and Agile, focusing on how they can complement and enhance one another. Arlen has done work in these areas at a number of large clients in Virginia and elsewhere, so he can share his eal-world experiences. Arlen…

(Edit: Alternative Title: Why Sun’s hiring of the JRuby developers isn’t just good for Ruby (Thanks Pat!) (Amazing the difference one word can make)) The latest news over the past few days has been all about Sun’s hiring of the JRuby developers. Many people have touted it as good news for JRuby, good news for…

This evening, I was sitting rocking our new daughter, listening to the relaxing, soothing sounds of Metallica. Actually, I was listening to the radio, and a Metallica song came on, but nonetheless it hit me. If I were hiring a developer, who would I want them to emulate better than Lars Ulrich? So, I guess…

Phlip made an interesting post about the discipline of XP, in response to a question about it on the XP list: XP is the discipline to only write code when you have achieved this checklist: a user story, with a priority a failing storytest for that story a failing unit test for a feature in…