Saturday, February 20, 2010
The first week of March will be a mix of old and new for me. I’ll be speaking at a new conference, ESDC, the Enterprise Software Development Conference. This conference isn’t just new for me, it is new period, taking over the traditional calendar-slot of the defunct SD West. If you’re interested in attending you […]
Paul Julius and I have put together a training class for neglected population: Â build engineers. We don’t mean release management people exactly, though sometimes they have the build engineer job. No, we mean those people who are told “go write the build script”. Historically the build, like an installer, is a very low status job. […]
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
I went to Elisabeth‘s Open Source Testing Automation Tools Love In with a very clear mission: “Get SafariWatir testing my local WordPress instance the right way“, where the right way meant using a single script that would also run against IE and Firefox without modifications. I’m not sure I was a good OSTATLI participant because I […]
Back in 2005 I read Now, Discover Your Strengths and took the original StrengthsFinder test. My top 5 strengths were: Strategic: People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed.  Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues. Input: People strong in the Input theme have a craving to […]
PJ and I just received the feedback from our talk at SDBP on Creating Habitable Code. I was very pleased by our marks, particularly the 8.6 for “Would you recommend this session to a colleague?” But reading the comments, we obviously left at least one attendee unconvinced and unimpressed: What was this? Some of the […]
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Jared Richardson and Matthew Bass are working on a new book on actively managing your career, and as part of that effort they’ve started a blog on it called Career 2.0. On Monday their entry was “What’s Your Strategy?” where they asked: What’s the single best career move you’ve made? The worst? Do you have […]
Thursday, November 27, 2008
I just committed an initial pass at an Xcode builder for CruiseControl. If you want to try it out you’ll need to get the latest code from svn. Right now the plugin is extremely rudimentary: it has only the single attribute ‘directory’ which is where it will invoke xcodebuild. Here’s an example from config.xml for […]
Friday, November 21, 2008
As of Wednesday night CruiseControl 2.8 is available for download (full release notes). I’ve got a good feeling about this release because unlike a lot of releases I have the feeling that we’re doing more than adding feature and fixing bugs (though we did that too). This release felt like we were paying off technical/hygiene debt […]
Saturday, November 8, 2008
Last week while attending Scott Ambler’s talk on Agile in Practice at SDBP I tried and failed to share his Agile Criteria slide in real time. Apparently there’s a limit to what iPhone, Twitter and sloth can accomplish in a dark lecture hall. So here, only one week and one day later are Scott’s criteria, the things he looks […]
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
(This isn’t for you. This is a love letter to my unit tests, who deserve it, who deserve a 5 am stream of consciousness homage.) Slow builds really bug me. And having lots of unit tests is no excuse for a slow build. If you think they are, there’s something you’re not doing right. This past week […]