Category: General

Yesterday was the St. Louis Code Camp, and what a great time! I believe around 70-80 people showed up, and we had some really great presentations. On top of the books Apress donated, Microsoft donated some books, goodies, and an XBox 360! The day consisted of four sessions across four different rooms. The first session…

In getting ready for my talk this weekend on Ruby, I scanned the RubyCLR project founder’s web site, and came across this post: This is a really exciting development in RubyCLR. I’ve taken the first steps in integrating Rails’ most excellent ActiveRecord object-relational mapping layer with Windows Forms data binding. He then goes on to…

In the article Tech Companies Check Earlier for Flaws, the WSJ almost does a good job bringing the need to slow down an inject slack into an organization in order to produce higher quality code. I say almost because while it hits some good points, like: While the BlackBerry had escaped serious scrutiny for security…

Very interesting article in the San Fransisco Gate online about Ron Patrick, a 50 year old Engineer who has put, very cleanly, a 1450-horsepower T58 Jet Engine on the back of his VW Bug. My favorite quote: He said that a jet-boosted run will “pin the speedometer and that’s at 140.” He thinks that when…

This Saturday, May 6th, is the long awaited St. Louis Code Camp. Some good sessions throughout the day, and I’ll be giving two talks: one on an introduction to Ruby for C# Developers, and the other Achieving Customer Zen with Fitnesse. Then, Wednesday May 10th I’ll be at the Mid Missouri XP User’s Group as…

A couple of weeks ago, I was talking to a reporter about Offshoring and Extreme Programming. One of the challenges was the term, “Extreme Programming”. How do you get the ideas across as a whole unit without turning people off by the term? Turns out, even Kent Beck is having to do that. He is…

Bob Martin, on the TDD list expounded some more about the Green wrist band he wears: I wear a green wrist-band that says “Test First”. This green band is a symbol of my committment to a minimum standard of professional behavior. Part of that minimum standard is: “I will not release code that I have…

On a recent post on Slashdot perhaps one of the funniest comment threads ensued that I have seen in a while. It started with Jeremy’s post: So, they give me a laptop… I get multple T3 internet connections, pay me to work… free bagels on Fridays, free coffee every day, and they can’t fire me…

A brilliant job opening post came across the XP Jobs mailing list today. Shame it’s all the way in France, because how could you not want to work for a company whose job posting looks like: LEIRIOS is looking for 2 senior java developers for its R&D; department based in Besançon (France). (French-speaking and fluent…

Over the past few months, we’ve had the chance to explore getting up and running with Fitnesse and .NET and the chance to check out how to implement ActionFixtures. While both Column and Action fixtures are great ways to express requirements, there is another fixture which is extremely powerful, and allows your customer to write…