It looks like the Mono project has released version 1.1.17. It’s great news for two reasons. First, we now have the NUnit GUI building out of the box (with our 2.4 Release Candidate code) on Mono/Linux: Secondly, according to Matt Hargett, Reflector now runs on Mono (if you use the /compat switch) Big kudos to…
India outpacing China?
Money magazine is running a story this morning entitled Why India will overtake China. It’s a good read, especially because I’m right in the middle of Tom Friedman’s The Word is Flat. The real question is, with both countries getting access to better resources, better infrastructure, better engineers, and a better focus on developing math…
Practices of an Agile Developer Review
“Whatever you do, don’t touch that module of code. The guy who wrote it is no longer here, and no one knows how it works.”1 In Practices of an Agile Developer, Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt put that quote as an example of something we are all afraid to hear, but probably have in our…
TDD Bowling Game – Part 2
In our first segment we got up and running with NUnit, created the foundation of our BowlingGame and got spares working. But spares aren’t what bowlers live for – it’s strikes. Let’s see if we can get that working. Back to the problem at hand. We’ve got the tests passing for Spares, so let’s see…
Developer Motivation
A friend of mine, Tony, recently put up a blog post entitled Developers Considered as Obstacle to Agility, detailing some of the challenges he’s faced getting some of the XP practices adopted in his workplace. I had already been thinking about motivation and teams, based on a post on the XP mailing list by Kevin…
TDD Bowling Game – Part 1
One of the canonical examples of Test Driven Development is Ron Jeffries‘ Bowling Game. It’s been done many times, and Ron has done several articles about various methods and outcomes from his experiences in doing the game for groups. A couple of months ago, I found out I was going to be speaking at a…
Cards on a wall
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…
Downtime and why I love my hosting company anyway
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…
CARFAX 250
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…
Color photos from World War I
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…