If someone asks/tells me to use a tool, process or technique to develop software (or do anything for that matter) I always ask myself if the use of that thing will add value to the product I’m developing. No matter who said it, no matter what guru wrote it in a book, no matter how […]
Domain knowledge is just nomenclature. When it gets right down to it, we are all just pushing data around. That is it. It doesn’t matter whether we are talking “cementing”, “well bores”, “acidizing”, “twin pumper” or “call disposition”, “voicemail”, “CFNA”, “CFB”, “line provisioning”. The data goes in a database. The program gets the data out, […]
About a month ago I was talking about my initial forays into Ruby and RubyOnRails. I’ve sinced written what I consider to be a real (if simple) application and I’m still impressed with Rails. Over the last 5 weeks, I have worked about 40 hours (including database development) on an administration website for the latest […]
Ok, now that I’ve got your attention, let me just say this. I’m not a millionaire, so I have no idea how to become one for sure. I do, however, have a theory on how to become a millionaire and I’m trying it out as we speak. Before I divulge this theory, let me just […]
I continue to be impressed with the speed of web app development with Rails. I decided to write another simple web app to play around some more with Rails and see exactly how fast I could do it. I developed a simple status report tool, which is kind of similar to the comment form processor […]
Oh yeah, could you add a timestamp to that app so we know when the row was added? Sure… “ALTER TABLE blah ADD COLUMN created_on timestamp(14);” Done…(and I mean _completely_ done). Wow. Nice.
Maybe “Bye Bye Java” is a little extreme, but it got your attention I bet. Especially if you know how much Java I’ve done in the past, both professionally and in my spare time. So what could possibly make me give up Java? Well there were really only two places where I was doing much […]
The two main ideas being bandied about these days in regards to the best environment for software developers are private offices and open bullpens. Both these extremes are being promoted heavily in the industry. The likes of Spolsky and Microsoft are into the private office thing (or so I’ve read) and most agile methodologies such […]
I’ve been reading Agile Software Developer with Scrum by Schwaber and Beedle, and as opposed to my earlier opinion of daily standup meetings, the scrum meeting is something I could get onboard with, at least as described in the book. I guess it comes down to whether the meeting is productive or not. I’ve suffered […]
There are so many other software development methodologies out there that are just such a pain of process that one might wonder why I pretty much only write about the deficiencies in agile methodologies. Aren’t there easier targets out there? The answer is yes, but then again, easy targets are no fun. I really do […]