Kids and Apple Photobooth

On vacation in San Diego I ended up at one of my favorite locations, an Apple Store. Turns out with two 5 and a half year olds the Apple store is a mini entertainment center.

Apple’s Photobooth, one of the free little applications you get with all the new Macs, proved a bigger hit [...]

Trading a Desk for a Circular Table

I had quite a few one-on-ones with developers today and almost all of them started with:

“Wow, I didn’t realize you took out the desk.”

Last Thursday my desk partition was removed and replaced with a smallish circular table for meetings and to have more of a team room atmosphere. My normal office these days [...]

Confluence for Non-Profit

Confluence is available for a free license for non-profits who can’t afford to pay. Our local java users group (SACJUG) fit the bill for this, though no one’s ever been quite organized enough to officially register as a non-profit.

At the last SACJUG meeting we debated over what wiki/content management system to use and eventually [...]

Introducing Agile Through Tools

I’m a tools guy. I love to try out new tools. I get excited by the most boring of build tools like ant, maven, or rake or even code review tools like Jupiter or Crucible. In the book Applied Software Project Management they introduce the concept of building support for change through tools:

Another way [...]

Keeping Your Rails Migrations Clean

I’m working my way through a for fun side project using Rails 1.1 and I’ve been using ActiveRecord migrations instead of the older style SQL scripts. I like them a lot because it allows me to continue to stay in Ruby. Still each time you want to make a change to a table you need [...]