Category: General

I can finally announce today that I’ve accepted a position with Microsoft! I’m going to be working with the PSS team based out of Tampa, FL, and I’ll be starting October 2nd by spending 3 weeks in Redmond. So if you are up that way, shoot me a line – I’d love to get together!…

On CNN this morning they are reporting that Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, died after a stingray he was swimming over shot his barbed tail through his chest. This is definately a sad day, as I always enjoyed watching him and I think he brought a lot of people’s awareness up of various animals. R.I.P….

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is one of the core practices of XP. Generally when I introduce people to the concept, I either get a look that says I’m crazy, or they comment on how they used to do that “back in the day”, which generally leads to discussions about walking uphill 20 miles in the snow…

In the last post about Mono 1.1.17, I posted that about running Lutz Roeder’s Reflector in Mono. Yes, Reflector does run in Mono, on Linux. I’ve seen some quirks with it, but here’s a screen shot of it: I started it by running mono Reflector.exe /compat after downloading and unzipping it. Cool stuff!

It looks like the Mono project has released version 1.1.17. It’s great news for two reasons. First, we now have the NUnit GUI building out of the box (with our 2.4 Release Candidate code) on Mono/Linux: Secondly, according to Matt Hargett, Reflector now runs on Mono (if you use the /compat switch) Big kudos to…

Money magazine is running a story this morning entitled Why India will overtake China. It’s a good read, especially because I’m right in the middle of Tom Friedman’s The Word is Flat. The real question is, with both countries getting access to better resources, better infrastructure, better engineers, and a better focus on developing math…

“Whatever you do, don’t touch that module of code. The guy who wrote it is no longer here, and no one knows how it works.”1 In Practices of an Agile Developer, Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt put that quote as an example of something we are all afraid to hear, but probably have in our…

In our first segment we got up and running with NUnit, created the foundation of our BowlingGame and got spares working. But spares aren’t what bowlers live for – it’s strikes. Let’s see if we can get that working. Back to the problem at hand. We’ve got the tests passing for Spares, so let’s see…

A friend of mine, Tony, recently put up a blog post entitled Developers Considered as Obstacle to Agility, detailing some of the challenges he’s faced getting some of the XP practices adopted in his workplace. I had already been thinking about motivation and teams, based on a post on the XP mailing list by Kevin…

One of the canonical examples of Test Driven Development is Ron Jeffries‘ Bowling Game. It’s been done many times, and Ron has done several articles about various methods and outcomes from his experiences in doing the game for groups. A couple of months ago, I found out I was going to be speaking at a…