Musings of a Software Development Manager

I launched a Basecamp project today. Nothing fancy, just a little project site for our company’s core values committee. Yes, we fall into the Ken Blanchard Managing by Values type corporation or at least we’re trying. Anyway I’m a sucker for trying to make things better over just complaining and besides the theme this year [...]

Up until we brought in the suite of IBM Websphere tools and many of the developers migrated over to Rational Application Developer 6.0 (RAD), we were doing all deployments via ant. I confirmed last week that we’ve switched over in the last 9 months to almost complete reliance on building WARs or EARs from RAD [...]

I’m going through installing MySQL 5.0 on my G5 iMac so I can progress through the Agile Web Development with Rails book. One of my brothers is going though it and wants to bounce issues off me as he comes across them. Anyway I knew the installer had gotten very easy and that it included [...]

After 23 days into the first Sprint on one of my teams projects, I finally got a very rewarding email from Cruisecontrol with the following message: Unit Tests: (89) All Tests Passed The comment on the CVS file, 1EmployerManagerTest , was simply: first test cases The back story is I had been charting the unit [...]

I signed up for a free one project account for Basecamp today and setup a small project for my company’s core values committee. So far it seems really nice, easy collaboration with a small team. The real test will come over the next few weeks if it actually gets used. I love these sorts of [...]

We’ve turned on Java 2 security in our environment. Java 2 security is turned off on every app server by default including Websphere. This little setting caused us quite a few problems as we hadn’t built any of our applications with this in mind. My anecdotal experiences is that I’ve never seen it used anywhere, [...]

My second stint as a manager, about 6 years ago, was leading a team of web developers at a dotcom ecommerce consulting shop called XUMA. We specialized in ATG Dynamo, a java application server you’ve likely never heard of. Like many, many dotcoms we went through the boom and bust cycle during the 18 months [...]

According to Gartner by 2008 at least 10% of employers will require laptops to be provided by employees. All I can say is I certainly hope so. I’ve used my personal laptops for at least three employers in the last 6 years. I’d much prefer to use my more productive Mac laptops versus your generic [...]

I’m trying to make sure I really understand Ruby’s blocks and closures, so I was digging ahead to Chapter 22 of the Pickaxe book on ‘Blocks, Closures, and Proc Objects.’ On page 358-359 there was a bit of example code: def meth1 (1..10).each do |val| return val # returns from method end end I would [...]

Well it appears JUnit 4.0 has made it out. Of course it’ll be a while until I can use it for anything since it’s 1.5 dependent and we have to wait for IBM and their wonderful Websphere line. Technorati Tags: software development, test driven development, websphere