Over the past several months, I’ve seen a resurgence on the various mailing lists I’m on asking a simple question – why aren’t more women in technology, and software development specifically? For example, on the Software Craftsmanship mailing list, Josh Cronemeyer asked the following: I was talking to a colleague about the SCNA conference. When…
System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException when opening an ASP.NET Project
This morning I was opening an ASP.NET project on my Win7 box in Visual Studio 2008, when a message popped up which only said: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException If you run into this, there are three things you need to do: Make sure you have IIS installed – This sounds silly, but since I had just rebuilt my…
New Home
You may have noticed a new look and feel around the site. Yes, after just 5 years I’ve finally updated the theme for the site, changing entire hosts and blogging platforms in the process. The whole thing went so smoothly that it still feels wrong. Hosting Providers – I switched from HostMySite.com (still one of…
The Misnomer of Open Space
Recently there has been an explosion of “Open Space” events and sessions at conferences across the world. Suprisingly (or not-so-suprisingly) the results of these aren’t always this wonderful touchy-feely explosion of experience and sharing that open space events are made out to be. Why is that? First, there are actually two types of events labeled…
Exceptions in Constructors: How Reflection Helped Workaround an Oracle Bug
Our application supports both SQL and Oracle users. To do this, there are certain things that we need present at runtime – like an Oracle Provider. But, in our case, we require a certain version or higher due to the API calls we need to make. During testing for our upcoming release, we found a…
Hope is Not a Risk Management Strategy
To many people, software projects are a lot like black magic. You are trying to build something that no one knows the contents of until it’s been built, in a way that responds to change, in some semblance of a reasonable timeframe and budget. Everything from the estimation process, to the status calls, to the…
Scrum Alliance Community Liaison Announcement
Hi All, Over the past couple of weeks, there has been some hubub over a letter that went out from the Scrum Alliance to their user groups. This letter let to an announcement that the Orlando Scrum User Group was closing. This led to a posting I did on the Scrum Development list. This in…
acts_as_versioned: Getting started
I was recently building an app which needed to take advantage of versioning. I liked the look of acts_as_versioned, which is a nice add-on to Rails to versions models. However, the tutorial-fu is pretty sparse, and what is out there is pretty old, so I wanted to write up what it took to get it…
BarCampOrlando Follow-up: Software Craftsmanship Resources
Thanks again to everyone that came out to my Software Craftsmanship talk at BarCampOrlando yesterday. I had a blast, and I enjoyed talking with so many of you throughout the day about moving forward with becoming craftsmen in your own organizations. Here are some resources I talked about or listed in the slides: Agile Manifesto…
Disciplines of a Software Developer: Compassion
“Bob, we need to talk. I’ve been reviewing the check-in histories, and Steve hasn’t bothered to check in anything in the past 6 days. When he does check-in, his quality is just utter crap. I don’t know what happened, but I’m tired of dealing with him and his slack attitude.” We’ve all had team members…