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Category Archives: Software Development

Software Development musings

Laziness

Chris is a developer after my own heart. He’s lazy, anal retentive and artistic. And those are complements! I’ve always felt laziness was one of the keys to being a good software developer. At IIA I named a project that ran-a-muck through the engineering department. It was called “S.E.A.L.” which stood for “Software Engineers Are […]

Podcast Roundup

Ever since I got the shuffle I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. I monitor about 10 or so podcasts in iTunes for interesting episodes but there is a core group of casts that I always make a point to listen to. Here they are for your listening pleasure. Drunk and Retired – This […]

Caught in an Oily .Net

Once again I’ve switched employment situations. I’m back in the .Net world and surprise, surprise, back in the oil & gas industry. I’ll be working in downtown Calgary for the next 6 months (at least) at a major oil & gas product company. I’m back working with a large user group (not in the 100000s […]

Progress

The biggest impedence to progress is people who don’t think there is a problem.

Impossibility

People can’t get excited if they think a task/project/goal is impossible. Something can be hard to achieve, but unless people actually think they can do it, they aren’t going to go the extra mile it might take to reach the goal. For some reason, I’m feeling philisophical today.

Outsourcing Exposure

Last night I talked to India. It was the first exposure I’ve had to outsourcing a part of a project I’m involved in and it may take a little while to get my head around it. I’m not sure I can explain it, but it just feels bizarre to know that while I’m sleeping someone […]

Lower Fun == Lower Quality & Lower Productivity

How taking away the fun takes away from the software

Individual Agility

It seems to me that “agile” methodologies like Scrum and XP are very distinctly _not_ agile (i.e. not flexible) for the individual members of the team. There are strict rules that basically dictate a 9 to 5 work day with mandatory things such as daily (at least) meetings, pair programming and unit testing that make […]

Collective Code Ownership

I think my problem with collective code ownership is that people confuse it with collective code responsibility. Everyone is responsible for the code, yes. To me this means that everyone on the team should be able to look at any code on the project and figure out what is going on and be able to […]

Daily Meetings, Part Trois

In the past, I’ve wavered about daily stand up meetings. The whole idea originally didn’t strike me as such as good one. It fell under the category of “something that may be useful, but could be a waste of time and there are other ways to accomplish the same goals”. Then I actually read the […]