Category: General

In an XP project, you figure out what you are doing by looking at your backlog, or list of stories, for the current iteration (or sprint if you are into the Scrum thing). One key question your team has to figure out is where the stories will be listed. For example, many XP teams are…

At about 7:50 am EST this morning, the main fiber line to the datacenter that hosts my website and mail was severed by some construction people. Unfortunately, this meant that my site and mail were down all day, which was slightly nerve-wracking. In the midst of it all, the hosting company I use – HostMySite…

Just a quick note to you racing fans that my employer is sponsoring a NASCAR Busch Series race (and driver!) this Saturday – the CARFAX 250, at Michigan International Speedway. There’s been a lot of excitement around it, and if it is anything like last weekend’s race at Watkins Glen, it should be a lot…

One site I read quite regularly is Damn Interesting, a site I found through my friend Brady. They usually have some great articles, but this one is just amazing. During the early 1900s, a Russian photographer figured out a way to create color photographs from black and white film by using special plates and a…

Michael Feathers just posted a new tool he wrote called Vise. Basically it snapshots the values of your variables that you want to track, so if you rerun it it will catch anything that has changed or is missing. It’s still pretty Alpha stuff, but is definately worth a look.

At the Agile 2006 conference, we were sitting around a table discussing Agile within organizations, I believe with some people from Capital One. One of them talked about trying to go Agile, and my coworker Marc said: Being Agile is like being pregnant. You either are or you aren’t. You just have to work it…

Finally got the photos uploaded. Here some shots from around Agile 2006. I figured out that by next year I need to find out what type of lens Tom Poppendieck is using, since I shot several photos in the same room as him and his came out much better. Scott Ambler, talking about his survey…

File under “Things I’ll go searching for in about 2 years and won’t be able to find” We’ve been doing a lot of crazy things with Oracle at work. Our team has been using some Advanced Queuing features to pass XML data down, and then shredding the XML into tables. It’s great fun. Today we…

Sorry I haven’t gotten the last Agile 2006 post up. We’ve just made it back to Missouri after enduring the radiator blowing up in our car (with 2 adults, a 6 week old infant, and our 2 dogs) in Chattanooga, TN. Everything should be caught up by tomorrow night at the latest.

First – I realized that I misnamed the days. So, I’ll just call this “Thursday”. I decided that, because I hadn’t had a chance to hear him speak yet at this conference, I would head over to Bob Martin’s Clean Code talk first thing. And it’s a good thing I did – the room filled…