LSSC Video of My Kanban Experience Report

Back in April I was selected to give a Kanban experience report at Lean Software Systems Consortium in Atlanta, and as luck would have it InfoQ had set up a camera in the room I was presenting in. Yesterday, they posted it online: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Moving-to-Kanban

This was the first time I was recorded giving a presentation, so it's the first time I've seen myself give a presentation. And I must say, I am one of the presenters I've ever seen! OK, maybe not, but it wasn't as embarrassing to watch myself as I thought it would be. Seeing myself at least let me see some things I can improve on. (Dear Lord, Tim...STAND STILL for a second.)

And while I'm throwing some video out, Dave Giard recorded a video interview with me back at Codemash this past January. I finally got around to watching that one, too. For Dave's beer being off screen on one side and my bourbon off screen on the other side, it went pretty well.

Dave's Technology and Friends, Episode 71: http://technologyandfriends.com/archive/2010/02/15/tf0071.aspx

 

 

Large Latte, No Foam, Extra Code Please

A little over a year ago, Code and Coffee was born. After a weekend in Kalamazoo and a good talk with Mike about his little group of Bitslingers in Cincy, Jeffery and I stole borrowed hatched the idea to get our butts out of bed early, hit a coffee shop somewhere, and write some code. Any code would do, but preferably something outside our comfort zone. Code and coffee numero uno saw us working on the Ruby Koans.

It’s moved around Columbus to different places. Started out at Polaris, held in Dublin a couple times, and we’ve had a pretty regular group at Stauf’s in Grandview since last November. I’ve lost track of the number of new faces that have showed up at our little gathering, but there are a few – like Greg and Andrew – who have been to almost all of them.

“Yeah, so what, Wingfield…we know you do this Code and Coffee crap, it’s in your twitter stream more than ice hockey and Hair Band Friday combined.”

OK, ok…my point: Last Thursday, Aug 12th, we had a 23 geeked up, caffeinated coders in 3 locations in two different cities writing code for the fun of it before they went to work. 23 guys and gals in Grandview, Columbus, and Indianapolis. (Props to Scott for getting it rolling in Indy!) 23 people would be one helluva dev team; especially if it’s THESE 23 who care enough to get up and do an hour of coding for fun before work.

What do these 23 people compare to?

• That’s a whole football team plus a kicker
• That’s 10 more people than have ever coached the Chicago Bears
• That’s an entire active NHL roster
• That’s one less than all the sousaphone players in the OSU Marching Band…in other words, it’s all the sousaphone players NOT dotting the I.

That’s a lot of sports references for a bunch of geeks so…

• 23 is the atomic number of vanadium
• 23 is the port used for telnet
• Julius Caesar was stabbed 23 times…that might be a bad example
• 23 is the lowest prime number to consist of consecutive digits. (Back to geekdom!!)

I’ve had a lot of fun at Code and Coffee and can’t deny having 23 people at three locations on some random Thursday brings a smile to my face.

But why stop at 23?

Want to geek it up with fellow geeks? Start a Code and Coffee. Pick a place to meet and a time and hit up twitter. (We use the hashtag #codeandcoffee, it’s worked great for setting up gatherings.) Let’s go beyond 23 folks.

At least to 34 so I can make some Walter Payton references.

45 for a little Archie Griffin.

Then to 61 so I can add Rick Nash to the fray.

Why Not Add Some Ruby?

If twitter is good for one thing it’s starting debates amongst your friends. Today didn’t disappoint as Mike started us off with: “things i miss from rails while i'm doing java: rails.”

It started in the productivity trap, which is going to be subjective to the developer doing the work, so it’s a tough one to measure. Can I do some things faster in Ruby than I can C#? Yes, but the inverse is still true.

One point I need to make is I’ve seen a few of these discussions and often they become Rails v. C#/.Net, which isn’t really a fair comparison because Rails is a web framework. To go apples to  apples, you need to compare Rails to ASP.Net MVC, not .Net in general. You wouldn’t compare WebForms or WPF to Ruby or Python, would you? (You shouldn’t compare WebForms to much of anything…but I digress.)

So, Jon asked a pretty valid question: Why don’t more people switch? Since I come from a .Net background, I’ve really only seen this debated as it pertains to .Net.

For a number of the arguments around the IDE, Intellisense, Static v. Dynamic typing, there are plenty of other blogs that have covered this, here’s a recent one I really liked: Ruby is Scary.

For my quick entry here, I’ll say this…I can have VIM or TextMate open and have a couple tests written before the VisualStudio splash screen has closed. Also, those two tools have yet to throw an “Out of Memory” exception on me, can’t say the same for Studio.

And I don’t really miss intellisense.

On with the show…

On the heels of Jon’s question Bill Sempf jumped in. As a bystander, Bill was very much representing the average .Net dude, and the arguments I’ve heard from the average .Net dude. (Bill has looked into Ruby, we’ve paired writing Ruby. That’s not really the point here, though.)

Ruby, the Average Dev, and the Complex System

@JonKruger: That's not my problem. I just don't think that 80% of the dev teams out there can handle coding in Ruby. (link)

That was Bill’s entry to the discussion, and I’m not sure I can disagree with him. However, I’m going to be snobbish and self centered and say I want to work with the 20%. If you’re in the 80% and can’t code Ruby…or Python, or F#, or any other language you have to learn…I don’t want to work with you. You can stay in “The Enterprise.”

@JonKruger: My point is those stories are told by top-tier devs, and not everyone is one of those. (link)

Again, tough to disagree with Bill’s assertion here. Not everybody is a rock star, and that’s cool. If you’re a budding rock star, you’ll be able to write some effective Ruby code.

In between those tweets were a few others, mainly around supporting complex systems using Ruby. Personally, I haven’t written a large scale application in Ruby, so I can’t lean on any experience here in writing the typical central Ohio “claims app” in Ruby.

What I have done with it has worked well. So my first counter to Bill’s argument on the complex systems: Use it where it fits. Ruby brings a great set of DSLs to the table for testing, web frameworks, and testing. Yeah, said it twice. Year one of Codemash (Jan of ‘07) I listened to Neal Ford talk about DSLs to help write your applications and Polyglot programming. Using Ruby to support your app – to write build scripts, tests, POC web sites – falls right in on the polyglot thing.

On the testing side, I’d much rather read a batch of RSpec tests than a batch of nUnit tests. Cucumber is already helping my current team get through some testing issues. Let me repeat that: I’m using Cucumber in a .Net environment RIGHT NOW to help the team get better test coverage on their application.

Learning a New Language

@JonKruger: There is a difference between learning the language, and being productive in it. (link)

I’m in total agreement with Bill here. Which is why I’m such a big fan of the incremental approach to using Ruby on your projects.

Great place to start: use Rake as your build script. I’ve done this for a couple years now, it’s a great way to dip your toe into Ruby, get comfortable with the language and a few of its concepts without really getting in on your production code. On the .Net side, use Albacore with Rake and you’ll have a build script in no time.

Next up you can start writing some tests in it. That’s a pretty good way to pick up a new language, anyway. And with the nice testing tools with Ruby, you can learn a new language and ease some testing pain.

But, the main point here, don’t be afraid of picking up a new language. How many do you know already? If you’re a web developer, you probably already know Javascript, CSS, HTML, C# (or some back end language), a little SQL, and a healthy dash of XML. Picking up another one isn’t going to be too difficult.

Essence v. Ceremony

I first heard this from Neal Ford, possibly at eRubyCon a couple years back. But, Stuart Holloway had a great blog post about it prior to when I heard Neal speak.

To me (and many others), Ruby gets to the essence of what you’re after quickly. I find myself working within it’s idioms easily, not fighting them constantly with adapter patterns, dependency injection, and ORMs. I find that my tests flow naturally from the various testing tools I use in Ruby, and the code that makes those tests pass benefits from that.

So, to Bill’s point, maybe Ruby isn’t ready to have average devs write big, complex, “enterprise” systems in it. But, it is ready to support what you’re writing today. Right now. Why not give it a try?

Unless you’re afraid of learning…

3 Things to Help That Presentation Go Better

I recently gave two presentations at Codestock. One on Kanban that I’ve given a number of times and is well rehearsed, and another on IronRuby that I’d never presented before. I had given a similar talk, but a good bit of this one was new. Since I hadn’t practiced the IronRuby talk too many times, it didn’t go as well as I’d had hoped.

There’s the first sign I was going to have trouble, I hoped it would go well. The Kanban talk I knew would go well, not so much with the IronRuby talk. I had some time issues in preparing, had a number of other events I was was participating in, but none of that mattered to those people in the room with me in Knoxville while I did an under prepared presentation.

Here are three things you can do to save yourself the same fate I had in Knoxville.

1. Un-busy those slides!

Yeah, drop the bullet points, the animations, the cool stuff that PowerPoint or Keynote will let you do and just keep it simple. I mean, who’s telling this story? You or some software program that just needs you there to hit the “Next” button?

I was recently at a national/international level conference and a fairly well known speaker was giving a talk, but this person’s slides had all kinds of images and animations and bullet points. They had crammed so much info on each slide that a number of their headings were lost in the curtaining surrounding the screen. As an audience member I had a poor user experience, and I can’t recall the topic of the talk because I was so distracted by the horror that was on display in their slide deck.

Simplify. One image per slide is a technique I use often. Use that image to support what you’re talking about rather than BE what you’re talking about. Keep the animations low, one or two per slide is plenty. You don’t want to distract your audience, you want them listening to you.

The last point on un-busying your slides, I’m sure a few of you are thinking, “But when I upload my slide deck, nobody will know what the main points of the talk were.” That’s fine, put the supporting points to the slide in the speaker notes, then a downloader will have a good idea what you were talking about…in the presentation they should have attended. (Because you were that awesome!)

2. Practice, practice, practice!!

Give your presentation to the wall of your office a few times. Set up a few of your kid’s (or your own) stuffed animals and regale them with the wonders of TSQL. Give it to some colleagues in an informal lunch and learn. But, practice it a number of times. You want to be comfortable with the flow of the presentation and the points you want to make on each slide.

You can add speaker notes to help you through, and jog your brain on some points you’d like to make, but you want to practice enough that you’re comfortable to give a good talk without those notes. Because…

Let’s say – hypothetically – you own a MacBook Pro and an iPhone and you’re going to use the wonders of the Apple Corporation to help you give a presentation. You’re going to use the phone as your presentation remote and it’ll show you those bullet point, memory joggers mentioned above. And because it’s all Apple, all the time…IT’LL JUST WORK! But – again, hypothetically – something is wrong with the wireless network and for some reason the phone doesn’t want to connect to an ad hoc network on your laptop. What then? What of those memory joggers? The notes? Well, you will have practiced enough that this will barely even slow you down.

3. Practice those code samples

Yes, more practice. But with good reason.

Live coding can make or break you…it usually breaks me. I’ve bored enough people to tears with my live coding, that I rarely do it. I have some colleagues that are awesome at live coding demos. Somehow they’ve mastered the art of saying one thing and typing another. I don’t have that gift…just like I don’t have the gift of being able to hit a fastball, the gift 4.3 speed, or the gift a 103 MPH slap shot. But, I digress.

Practice those coding samples. I mean, as developers were in this to code anyway, just do the same code over and over so you can give the presentation without a hitch. I read a great line the other day, and though it applied to development in general, it definitely fits here: Novices will practice until they get it right, experts will practice until they never get it wrong. When it comes time to do a code sample in front of 40 developers, you’re going to want to be an expert.

That’s all there is to it

So, in review…

1. Keep it simple
2. Practice the presentation
3. Practice the code samples
4. And, um, have fun!

Yes, it’s a bit of work to put on a presentation. But when it comes time to deliver that presentation, the people watching you are giving up part of their day to spend with you. Respect those people and that hour of time of theirs that they’re giving to you.

IronRuby: Rake, Albacore, and you

In my post about setting up to run Cucumber with IronRuby, I included steps to install Rake and Albacore, but didn’t use them. In this post, we’ll put them to use.

Using Rake in .Net isn’t really a new idea, and a number of people have been using it for a while. I’ve used rake to compile and run the tests on all my .Net projects for at least the last year. Before Albacore came along to make my Rake tasks easier, I was copying the set-up from the folks at Fluent nHibernate. (FNH has used rake to build as far back as I can remember it existing and is now utilizing Albacore as well.) Now with IronRuby in the mix, rake is going to take on even more fun in your .Net projects.

For my example I’m again going to use my TestingSeaPound project, and specifically the rake file I’m using in that project. Pop it open real quick, and we’ll look through it.

At the top, you’ll see the standard Ruby require statements. In this file we’re including rake, the task library for RSpec, Cucumber, the task library for Cucumber, and Albacore.

Following the required libraries are a number of tasks that are combining the tasks that are defined later in the file. This is a way keep your rake file nice and dry. Define each task as needed, combine them in a call such as task :spec => [:msbuild, :rspec] to reuse them in different situations. From the command line in the directory where this rake file lives, if I enter “rake spec” it’s going to build the code then run RSpec

The only task in this list to take note of is the :default task. That’s the task that will run if you’re at the command prompt and just enter the command “rake”.

MSBuild

Skip down to the line that includes msbuild do |msb|. That’s our first task definition, and in this case we’re using the Albacore library. The top line of that task that includes the path_to_command is needed to build a .Net 4.0 project. I believe a fix is in the works, and may already be in place, but when I set up this file this was the way to call the .Net 4.0 compiler.

The next two lines, properties and targets, should look pretty familiar to anybody who has set up a .Net build in the past using MSBuild or Nant. Here we’re just saying what configuration we want to compile in, and what our target build is. Following that I’m setting the verbosity to quiet to keep the command line output fairly small.

The last line should be fairly obvious, it’s the path the solution file. Since MSBuild is very good at picking up a solution file and building it, why fight it? Pass the solution to MSBUild and let it do its thing.

nUnit

The next task down is our nUnit test runner. This is again an Albacore task, and it’s just pointing the test assemblies at the nUnit console app.

These two tasks are the only Albacore tasks in the file, so here’s as good a place as any to let you know the magic going on under the covers with Albacore. It is in essence building the correct command line arguments for MSBuild and nUnit and then shelling out to run them. Now, there’s more work going on than just that, but that’s the bulk of if. Albacore is giving us a nice DSL to write .Net build tasks. I’m only using two, there are a lot more available.

One important note: to this point our rake file hasn’t required IronRuby. You can use Albacore to build your project and run .Net based testing suites with MRI, IronRuby isn’t a requirement. I know as a .Netter that may seem odd, but we’re really not leveraging the Iron part of IronRuby.

Yet…

RSpec

The next two tasks are both RSpec tasks, and they’re running rspec against our .Net app. The first task is the default runner where it outputs a period for each passing test, the second will output the describe blocks and spec names.

NOW we need IronRuby. Not so much for the rake task, but because RSpec isn’t going to be able to test our dlls without the Iron added to our Ruby.

Cucumber

The final two tasks are Cucumber tasks. The first outputs the standard cucumber output, with each feature and specification output in their full glory – minus line numbers because I turned those off with the –-no-source option. The second task outputs the cucumber specs very much like nUnit and RSpec do, with a period for each passing test.

Once again we need IronRuby. Since I’m using the Ruby version of Cucumber in this case, we need to add the Iron to get it to reach into our dlls and do its magic.

That’s all for the tasks required to build and run the tests for this sample application. If you pull down the code and go to the root of the project and enter “rake all” at a command prompt, you’ll build it and run each suite of tests in order. Give it a try.

IronRuby at CONDG

Off the top, apologies for the rather dark color scheme. The slides I think I can change the contrast on a little and they’ll be fine, but I know better than to use a dark color scheme for my ide and/or text editor. I guess the editing of the config file in Rails was just all black, sorry about that. (On the config side, you didn’t miss much, though.)

HOWEVER! :)

I just uploaded a PDF of the slides and you can look at them in whatever color scheme really makes them pop! You can get it all here: http://github.com/timwingfield/TestingSeaPound/tree/CONDG

Not a total cop out, please take a look at the code sample if you want to see the complete test classes from the examples - both the nUnit and RSpec ones. The rails app uploaded is the same one I created in the presentation, complete with the poorly named controller.

Again, sorry for the dark background in places, but thanks for coming out to watch.

(And big thanks to Kruger for making me remember how much I miss AutoHotKey after moving to the Mac. Windows devs, download AutoHotKey as soon as you read this.)

IronRuby: 0 to Cucumber in 15 minutes

Once again, a 140 character (or less) “outburst” gets me in trouble with a follower and I end up with a blog post. This one is one I probably should  have written a while back. I’ve enjoyed working with IronRuby the last few months, so this little intro is long overdue.

First things first, you’ll need to install IronRuby. Head off to the download page, and click on your msi of choice and let the installer do its thing.

Since my goal here was to get cucumber ready to roll against some .Net assemblies, you’ll need to install a few gems. IronRuby comes with Ruby Gems already installed, so thankfully to install the ones you need you just need to type ‘igem install’ a few times.

“Wait, what? igem? WTF?” Yeah, that’s one of the IronRuby-isms, putting an i on the front of a couple of commands. If you’ve done a bit of Ruby, you’ll have a little muscle memory to retrain, but it’s a small hurdle. (You’ll also type ‘ir’ instead of ‘ruby’ to run a script and ‘iirb’ instead of ‘irb’ to get to irb.)

So, on with our gem installing…

igem install rake

First install is rake. I’m not going to use it right away on the cucumber running, but I’ll use it at some point, I always do.

igem install albacore

Like rake, I’m not going to use this one right away, but I’ve found it to be the one must have gem if you’re using rake with your .Net builds and test runners. It just makes you life that much easier.

igem install rspec

I’m not starting out writing rspec in this example, but cucumber is going to use its matchers.

igem install cucumber –-version “=0.6.4”

This is the one we’re after for this example. Be sure to add that version command on there because IronRuby isn’t quite ready for the latest version of Cucumber. But, 0.6.4 is going to get the job done for us.

igem install iron-term-ansicolor

The first time you run cucumber, it’s going to advise you to install this gem to get color coding in the terminal window. Go ahead and do it now, and you skip that warning. (Or don’t, and check the message for yourself. ;) )

Now all you need is some features, some step definitions, and a dll to write it all against. As luck would have it, I have just that written up in a code sample that I just used at Codestock a couple weeks ago. (And also coming soon to an Ohio user group meeting near you…) Here’s the root of that project: http://github.com/timwingfield/TestingSeaPound

The features directory there is where you’ll find my cucumber samples and the dll they are running against. Download it and give it a shot. Once you get it downloaded, open the command prompt in whatever directory contains the features directory (not the actual features directory) and type:

cucumber features

Happy IronRubying!

Upcoming Speaking Events

As is normal for me this time of year, I’ve got a number of events that I’m attending to do a little speaking and a little learning. This round will take me to three states, but only one time zone (thank goodness).

Indy Tech Fest, May 22

I’ll be presenting on Lean Software Practices. We’ll go through the seven principles of Lean Software Development, and I’ll present some experiences with each as I’ve practiced Lean over the last few years.

Indy Tech Fest might not be too familiar to us here in central Ohio, because it’s outside our MS region. (gasp) But, the folks in Indy do a bang up job with their events, and they have a large, active .Net community. This is my second year venturing west to join the folks at Indy, and it was a great time last year.

The Path to Agility, May 27

This is the first Path to Agility conference, and it’s being put on by the Central Ohio Agile Alliance at the Arena Grand theater in the Arena District of downtown Columbus. They’re bringing in Ken Schwaber to keynote the event, so I am most decidedly on the undercard.

I’ll be presenting my Kanban experiences over the last few years. It’ll introduce Kanban and how to use it to deliver software. I’ll relay the good experiences and the bad experiences.

There is quite a line up for this conference, and there’s still space available. If you can get a Thursday off work, it’ll well worth the $100 to attend. There are some top notch local agile people presenting. (The Clippers are at home that night, stick around for some baseball.)

Central Ohio Day of .Net, June 5

The “home” event. Can’t miss this one, it’s a great time every year.  Getting the Cincy, Dayton, and Columbus folks under the same roof has made for a great event the last two years.

I’ve been selected to give two talks this year. Upside, I’m giving two talks. Downside, it’ll cut into my hallway sessions.

The schedule isn’t out yet, so I don’t know which session fits where. I’m presenting a beginning IronRuby talk, where we’ll get it installed, bang out some ruby code, hit a few CLR objects, and possibly take a few whacks at a piñata to bring the fun level down a little. The second talk will be the same Lean presentation I’m giving in Indy.

Codestock, June 25-26

My second trip to Knoxville to get in on Codestock. This is a great event. It’s got .Net roots, but offers quite a bit outside the normal .Net conference sessions. There are a lot of choices to make on what to attend over the two days. They did move to downtown Knoxville this year, so I’m looking forward to the new venue.

I’m speaking twice here, as well. I’ll deliver a Kanban talk, and an IronRuby talk. The IronRuby talk is going to go a bit deeper on testing than the one I’m giving at CODODN.

An added benefit to Codestock is Wendy and the boys go along, and we turn it into a mini-vacation. So, I’ll get a little pool time in, which usually doesn’t happen at conferences not named “Codemash.”

Ohio User Group Tour, July 22, 27, 28

We’re going to IronRuby it up at the Columbus, Cincinnati, and Dayton user groups in July. This talk is going to go into testing our C# code with IronRuby, and what advantages there are to this. The reason the CODODN talk is the beginning talk is because I was scheduled talk for these user groups back in December. Since it’s roughly the same crowd, we’ll do the intro at Day of .Net and dive into the testing at the local user groups.

Expect to see some RSpec running against C#, Rails running on IronRuby, Sinatra running on IronRuby, and mabye we’ll get crazy and put a Rails front end on an nHibernate repository or something. All hell’s gonna break loose during this one!

If I survive all this, I’ll have like 3 weeks of summer to kick back and relax…

Mongo Mapper: Spelling Matters

Added Mongo Mapper to my test Sinatra app today, and kept getting a gem not found error. All the examples that came up in my various Google searches had:

require ‘mongomapper’

After a reinstall of the gem and a few curse words, I tried a little experiement:

require ‘mongo_mapper’

That did the trick.

Lean Conference Recap

Last week I was an attendee and a speaker at the Lean Software and Systems Conference. It was three days of lean, kanban, and flow; and it really got the wheels turning on a few things.

Off the top, a quick warning: If you are a restaurant owner and you don’t usually set up a buffet line in your restaurant, pray that Mary Poppendieck is not among the first few patrons to your new set up. This situation happened at the speaker lunch, and as 50+ lean thought leaders (and me) lined up, Mary came out with, “You would think a restaurant with a buffet line would understand queuing theory!”

Overall, the conference was very interesting. It wasn’t the normal dev conference I’m used to attending. The audience was comprised of project managers and team leads much more so than it was of developers and engineers. It made for a much different dynamic…and dress code. A lot more khakis and golf shirts than cargo shorts and Star Wars t-shirts.

The sessions were pretty good, but this was year two for this conference. That combined with the relative newness of the whole lean software movement led to some overlap in session content. Not saying that’s a bad thing overall, just the nature of the situation.

As with any conference, the hallway sessions add to the whole situation. I saw a few familiar faces and met quite a few new folks, including three guys who had flown over from Sweden for the conference. (And got past the volcano that wreaked havoc on the speaker schedule all three days.)

The only real downer for me was I didn’t get to visit open spaces. I was opposite the open spaces on Friday, so I was preparing to speak or speaking during the first part of the morning. After that, we were tearing down the booth and getting to the airport for our flight home. Would have liked to have seen what came out of those open spaces.

I thought my own session went pretty well. I did 45 minutes of a kanban experience report, and got a few questions near the end. The room was pretty big, so it didn’t lend itself too well to creating the discussion this topic has for me in the past. But, I was video taped for the first time in my short speaking career, so when that link comes out I’ll be sure to pass it around. (After reviewing it to make sure my hair looks ok.)

It looks like next year is slated to be in LA. I’ll submit a topic again, but even if I’m not selected to speak I may have to attend. This isn’t a CodeMash I must-attend-as-long-as-I-have-a-pulse type situation, but more to see how this conference matures and drives lean and kanban forward.

The Tool List from Kalamazoo X

Here is the list of tools that I mentioned (and some I forgot to mention) during my talk at Kalamazoo X.

Communication and Collaboration

1. Basecamp
2. AgileZen
3. Google docs 
4. Google sites
5. Trac
6. Bugzilla
7. Tiddlywiki
8. Pivotal Tracker

Source Control

1. git
2. github 
3. mercurial
4. bitbucket
5. Subversion
6. Tortoise SVN
7. Google code
8. unfuddle

Builder Servers and Continuous Integration

1. Hudson
2. TeamCity
3. Cruise Control
4. Cruise Control .Net
5. Cruise Control rb

Text Editors

1. Vim
2. emacs
3. e text editor
4. textmate
5. Notepad ++
6. Scite

Command Shell

1. Cygwin
2. Powershell

Scripting Languages

1. Ruby
2. Python

Books

1. Pragmatic Programmer
2. Productive Programmer
   
   

On the Move to Pillar

It wasn’t that long ago I was announcing my move to Reflex, but I am indeed taking the career on the road again, this time to join the team at Pillar Technology. Officially, I’ll be on board at Pillar on April 1st…no foolin’.

I have to give a big thanks to Andrew at Reflex for putting enough trust in me to make a difference there. In the short time there, we instituted a number of changes that will help them going forward. In two short months, we dove into cloud computing with Amazon, github, basecamp, Kaban, threw VSS out the window, and strived for more communication and visibility in all our projects. We bit off a lot in a short time and got some good positive momentum out of all of it.

However, as with any job or company, changes happen that effect everybody there. In this case, the changes came much quicker than I expected, and the opportunity to join Pillar came up and was too good to turn down.

Change is never too easy, but I’m excited to be joining Pillar. I’m going to get to work with some familiar faces, and some new ones. I’m going to get to push further into agile and lean, and learn from some leaders in the industry. All in all, I think this is an excellent opportunity for me and my career.

And, thankfully, Lotus Notes wasn’t involved in the decision making process what so ever.

Countdown to Kal-X

On April 10th I’ll be attending one of my favorite conferences, Kalamazoo X. This will be the second year for the X conference, a one day, one track, no code conference. Each session will be 30 minutes long this year, and there are some great speakers and sessions lined up.

I really enjoyed the one-track format of Kal-X last year, because everybody was in the same conversation. Since we had all been to the same sessions lunch became like a big open space, recap combo.

The non-coding part opens the conference up to more than just developers. There were managers, designers, marketers, and students there last year. It was a great mix, and lead to some great questions during the conference.

I’m going to take a half hour break from being an attendee to be a speaker this year, as well. I’m going to give 30 minutes on what tools your dev team should have to be more efficient and help you build higher quality software. There will be a few tools for the whole team, and a few suggestions for the individual to employ.

If you’re looking for a one-day conference that will get the wheels turning, I can’t recommend Kal-X enough.

Oh, and there’s this little brewery in Kalamazoo… :)

Dropbox, ASP.Net, and a Mac

I recently switched to a Mac for my development platform, and have enjoyed the experience so far. Working with zsh and ruby and rails and all kinds of things have been much easier in OSX. Getting down with .Net is still done in Win7 for me, usually on my VM. (I haven’t booted into Windows for .Net development, yet, VMWare has done great.)

I set up my environment so that most everything is saved on the OSX partition, which isn’t a big deal because VMWare just shares folders over to Windows. So, all my files reside in one place. Nice and tidy. I have a Code directory set up to keep my code on one spot (genius on the naming of that directory, I thought). It’s shared over to Windows, and I can get to everything in either OS.

The downside to this plan is that to Windows it’s a network share. If you’ve ever fired up Visual Studio to do some ASP.Net development over a network share, you know it’s not a happy camper. But, I don’t want to duplicate everything for the sake of keeping Studio happy. If I do that for Visual Studio, then I’ll have to do it for everybody, and that’s a slippery slope I don’t want to go down.

A little Googling later, and I find somebody using Dropbox to keep it all synced up. I’m already a happy Dropbox customer, and had the, “Well, duh!” moment as soon as I read it. (If you’d like to become a happy Dropbox customer, get an extra 250 MB when you sign up with my invitation. They give me an extra 250 MB, too.)

Pretty easy to set up at that point. I installed Dropbox on the VM, created a folder in it for .Net development, and I was all ready to go. ASP.Net was happy because it was now on a local drive, I was happy because I could still move things in and out of git on the Mac side of things.

I can already hear some howling, “You’re duplicating your code! It’s stored twice on the same machine!” True…but I Dropbox does all the syncing for me, so it’s mostly an afterthought. The upside is that I can get to it with the tools I want in the OS I want whenever I want. Code it up in Studio, grep the VSS files out of it in zsh, commit branch and merge with git on the Mac, and debug away in Windows.

Even though the code files exist twice, the tools don’t. I don’t have git or a text editor installed on Windows because I can use the Mac ones.

Another big downside would be coding sans Internet connection. For the most part Dropbox syncs everything up so quickly I rarely notice it. But, if I’m away from an Internet connection, that’s not going to happen at all, and even though both copies are on the same machine, they’d be out of sync until I get hooked back up. For all practical purposes, this hasn’t been an issue, yet.

Overall, for having a little duplication on the hard drive and an extra layer of something-that-could-go-wrong in there, the experience has been, well, not noticeable. Everything just works, I haven’t had to wait on Dropbox to finish syncing files yet, and I get to use the right tool for the right job.

Setting Job Change Goals

Having just gone through a job change, I thought about sharing one of the bigger aspects of my job search process. When this process started for me – and don’t be fooled, it is a whole process and not one taken lightly – I set four base goals that my new (or current) employer had to meet.

I was given this idea while listening to Ken Auer speak at SCNA this summer. Ken was telling of when he decided to start his own company and one of his mentors said, “Set four goals for yourself, and only one of them can be monetary.” That hit home with me at the time: only one can be monetary. It was simple, and in regards to your career plainly obvious, but actually hearing it made it hit much harder.

1. Can I effect change?

I’ve spent the last 5+ years living agile development and working with XP development practices. I’ve been involved with Book Clubs and started Code and Coffee. I’ve picked up four different build servers, enjoyed development in ASP.Net MVC, and done a cannonball into the Rails pool. Can I take all this knowledge and use it for good instead of evil? Can I get a new organization on a path of continuous improvement?

2. Will I get to continue to push Agile/Lean and work with good technology?

I’ve put a lot of time into Lean and Kanban over the last year and a half. Both learning it, molding the process on various projects, then speaking about it to about anybody who’d listen. I want to keep on that course, because I think I’ve only started to scratch the surface of what Lean can bring to an organization.

Additionally, will I continue to get to work with cool technology, or better, be involved in the decision making process on what technology we’ll use? The phrase, “Right tool, right job,” means a lot to me.

3. Cool people to work with.

I don’t want to be a one man dev team as the member of a one person dev team is never wrong. I want to be around people that I can continue to learn from, that will push me as much as I can (hopefully) push them. And, I want to have fun. It seems simple, but for many years of my IT career it hasn’t felt like work because it’s fun doing the job I do. A lot of that has to do with the people I’ve worked with in the past.

4. $$…can I get what I’m worth?

One of the four has to be about money – I don’t do this for free, after all.

Market value was one of the toughest things to determine. Different people value different skills at different levels. If you’re in the consulting game, you have to have a salary that your bill rate will support. And the downward pressure on bill rates the last year is no great secret.

The unspoken goal – family time.

This is one I never put on paper because it’s the first thing that concerns me while thinking about anything with my job and my career. I’ve been extremely lucky to have a wife and two boys who have supported me as I started speaking and being gone more weekends with code camps, give camps, and conferences. So, the length of the commute to any office becomes a big deal. In an interview don’t hit me with, “We have a mandatory 45 hour work week,” because you’re taking almost another day per month of my time away from my family.

If you’re in a position where you’re starting to poke around to see what might be next for you, take the time and spell out what you want. Talk it over with your significant other, with some close friends, and forge ahead. Writing it down makes you stop and think about where you really want to go.

At least it did for me.

Career.Next

When you start a new job, that first day is one of the most exciting you have while you’re there. You’re busy getting settled in, meeting new people, learning new ways of doing things, and eventually fitting in and finding your place. For me, that day was June 21st, 2004 and the new company was Quick Solutions Inc.

However, on that first day, you don’t start thinking about when the last day will be. But with most careers that last day on a job is out there somewhere. Eventually your career leads you on to something new, something more challenging, maybe something you never expected back on that first day. That’s exactly what has happened with me, and that last day at QSI that I never really expected will be January 8th, 2010.

To say I appreciate the opportunities granted me while I was at Quick would be a rather large understatement. I’m still in awe of some of the people I worked with over the years at QSI. Most everybody assembled in our app dev group was extremely talented and extremely passionate about technology, continuous improvement, and sharing what they knew. It was exciting to go to work most days because of who was going to be sitting at the desk next to you.

So what is next? I’m off to Reflex Design & Technology to help them build a development team. Actually, on day 1 I’ll BE the dev team - Lord help them. I’m more than a little excited to be stepping into this role with them. (Yes, if you’re doing the date math in your head, I’ll be at Reflex for two days then I head for Codemash.)

Again, many thanks to the folks I worked with at QSI. There’s no way I’d be ready to step into the role I’m taking without all that I’ve learned from all of you over the last five plus years.

I’m sure at this point many of you are asking, “Why did he leave?” That’s not easy to answer. It’s a very long and complex process I went through to arrive at this decision. But, I managed to sum it up in just two words…

Lotus Notes

Five Days with My MacBook Pro

With a few changes headed my way in the coming new year, it was once again time to get some new hardware. I took the leap and opted for a MacBook Pro. (2.66GHz/4GB/320GB/15” so not the biggest, baddest one.) Here are a few of my initial leaving-Windows-and-Dell thoughts.

I can say after five days that I’m pretty sure I made the right move. There are a few things I’m struggling with in the switch, mainly my fingers going to the correct keys. Years of hitting CTRL on a windows keyboard has me hitting the fn key on the MBP, which doesn’t do much. Getting used to the Command key will take some time, but the oddest keyboard issue I’m having is hitting the B key. The reach is apparently shorter because I’ve put a lot of spaces where there should be a B.

On the flip side, it didn’t take me very long to get used to the multi-touch functions on the track pad. Having an iPhone doesn’t hurt, but the two, three, and four finger operations didn’t take long to become comfortable with. Scrolling through blog readers, articles, and Tweetdeck is a lot easier.

Installing applications is a lot easier, and a lot quicker than on Windows. To be fair, I haven’t installed a lot of huge apps, but the fairly large ones I did install went really quickly. The only real side-by-side comparison of installation I have is Tweetdeck, and it was a fraction of the time getting it up and running on the Mac. Most apps are just download, mount the image, drag to applications, unmount the image, and run it.

Now on to one of the bigger reasons I was after a Mac: Ruby on Rails development.

Rails on Windows was painfully slow at times. I tried all kinds of stuff to get my specs to run in less time than it took me to go downstairs and brew a cup of coffee. After copying the git repo of one of my sample apps over, I ran the specs and it reported .7-ish seconds. And it actually WAS .7-ish seconds. Not the 45 seconds of dead time at the command prompt while it fired up servers and stuff then reporting .7-ish seconds when it was done with the tests that I was used to. I’m already looking forward to doing some more of this.

Before I start sounding like a total fan boy, it hasn’t all been awesome. There was a 2 hour fight with an iso and some printer drivers to try and get my printer at home to work. Still haven’t got it to work, so I gave up and grabbed Brendan’s netbook to print off what I needed.

I’m also not enthralled with only having 1440 x 900 resolution. But, I’m getting old and my eyes would get tired staring at the hi-res Dell I had before, so maybe I should not worry about this one too much.

Also, couldn’t find any decent blog writer that lived up to Windows Live Writer, so this is being written in Live Writer in my Windows VM. (Bootcamp + VMWare Fusion + Win7 is freaking awesome. Looking forward to some .Net dev when I get Studio installed.)

Suffice it to say, the positives out weigh the negatives so far. I’m sandals-to-work away from swallowing the blue pill with the Apple logo on the side of it. :)