Category: General

A break from development a bit here, but in getting settled down into the new place, one of the things I decided to go ahead and do was use a Monowall box as my primary firewall. For years I’ve been using a Linksys Wireless router, and it’s still serving it’s purpose in Charlotte until we…

Let’s face it. Software we build is going to have bugs. Anytime you are writing a large system in the face of changing requirements, something isn’t going to work. It might be that a requirement wasn’t met, or changed during development. It might be that a spec was misunderstood, or that we as developers didn’t…

A recent post by William Pietri on the XP list caught my eye: Alas, I don’t have the data Brad is looking for on requirements gathering, but I did just happen to come up with some data on that eternal novice XP question: Doesn’t writing all of that test code slow you down? I just…

An interesting thing happened today. I’ve started a new position with a great company. Though I’ll be working out of Columbia, MO, they flew the team out to D.C. to the headquarters for the project kickoff. Last night and today has been a whirlwind of information, getting a fast-tracked overview of their existing systems and…

Over the past few weeks I’ve been pretty quiet on the blogging and list front. I’ve had a lot going on behind the scenes, and can now announce that I have accepted a position with a wonderful XP shop (and great company) called CARFAX in Columbia, MO. I am very excited by the opportunities there,…

A couple of weeks ago I posted a tutorial for getting Fitnesse and .NET working together. It was a good success, but I had an ulterior motive. I really just wanted to suck you, the reader, in so I could bring to you Ruby – a fun OO language. However, getting Ruby hooked up proved…

(Note: I posted this to Slashdot about a week ago and it’s still pending. I’ll update this when they finally get it in their review section) (Update: It finally got posted, only two months later.) I recently got sent a copy of Bruce Tate‘s newest book Beyond Java – A Glimpse at the Future of…

Recently on the C# Design Patterns mailing list, an email came over about this post by Andres Aguiar. In it, he makes an argument that I have heard several times before – why should I write a simple test when I know it’s going to fail, and besides, I know what it needs to do,…

A recent discussion on the TDD list led me to this paper from Rick Garlikov about how he used a method of asking questions to teach a group of third graders binary arithmetic in a short interactive session that I found quite fascinating: The Socratic Method: Teaching by Asking Instead of by Telling

Just a short note to say that I’ve accepted an invitation to blog for Apress Publishers. It’ll be mostly on Agile tips and technologies, but I’ll still be doing good stuff here as well. I think they sent out invitations to the User Group owners which is how I ended up with one. Anyway, you…