As a developer, it is really important to practice your craft. And a great way of doing that is through Code Retreats. The goal of a code retreat is to spend a full day practicing techniques you may not otherwise encounter. One of my favorite constraints to give to participants is as follows: Code Conway’s…
Category: General
Facebook “Shadow Accounts” for Non-Facebook Users
Facebook Shadow Profiles Recently I came across a set of articles talking about Facebook “Shadow Profiles”. If you haven’t read the articles, in a nutshell, Facebook links tremendous amounts of data about your account that you haven’t entered – but that your friends have. For example, if you had an email address you used for…
What is Scrum?
One of the more prevalent methodologies as part of the agile movement is Scrum. But, like people who use the term Agile, Scrum has come to mean different things to different people. I’ve spent the past 9 years working with teams to adopt various agile methodologies, including Scrum, and wanted to spend some time offering…
Forget Internships – This Is How We Grow Tampa’s Talent Pool talk now up!
A couple of weeks ago I got the chance to speak about Apprenticeships and Software Craftsmanship at Ignite Tampa Bay – specifically how we grow the talent pool locally when so many businesses are complaining about a lack of talent. The talk has now been published! Thanks to the entire Ignite Tampa Bay crew for…
Learning Programming: Introducing the Foy-Z Model
(If you’d like to see the video, click here) Earlier this year I was invited to be a speaker at SCNA 2012. At the time I was thinking a lot about quality and about the learning and growth process of developers. Back in March I helped launch the Florida arm of 8th Light, and now…
JQuery Datepicker – Selecting just Month or Year
Quick code post – We’re working with a client who needs to be able to select imprecise dates – either an exact date, the month and year, or just the year. Most date pickers aren’t set to handle this case, and I didn’t really want to write one from scratch. We were already using the…
On Community and Conferences
Technology Community – let’s chat for a second. Over the past…well, since you were created, you’ve been a male-dominated field. Unlike some other fields, you are well known for your cutesy “lack of social interaction”. Of course, now you are getting popular – it’s cool to be a “brogrammer” and code and hang out at…
Pareto and Minimal Viable Products/Hypothesis
In a recent post, Jim Shore blogs about a “Minimum Viable Hypothesis.” With MVH, the first step after figuring out the problem to solve isn’t to create a minimum viable product. Instead, the first step is to brainstorm market hypotheses. Which groups have the desire and funds for a solution? What Jim is blogging about…
Simple Design with Design Patterns
Over the past couple of months I’ve been working with several clients struggling with doing incremental architecture and design. As an organization moves away from a typical waterfall method – with lots of time for analysis and design – they have to find ways to still build scalable, sustainable systems in an incremental fashion. I…
Recreating Scrum using Kanban and Explicit Policies
This afternoon I was teaching a public class on Lean-Agile principles and practices, and a question came up about the differences between Scrum and Kanban. As a fun exercise, I recreated Scrum using Kanban coupled with a set of Explicit Policies. To briefly summarize the differences, Scrum is a methodology which consists at its core…