Musings of a Software Development Manager

As with many techies I did some tech support for myself and relatives over the weekend: Setup my in-laws backup solution to an external hard drive and did their first full backups. This took some time just because backing up about 200GB across two machines isn’t that fast. Setup a wireless network for my in-laws. [...]

As a bonus Xmas gift this week, I completed my part of a code review of a developer’s code before heading out Friday. The code review primarily covered a JSF backing bean/controller and a corresponding test case. Even though the tests had mostly been written after the test case was just a joy to read: [...]

Listening to an interview on Software Engineering Radio with Amazon’s CTO, Werner Vogels, a novel idea to chartering a project was explained. At Amazon instead of the traditional project charter or having a team just start with playing around with new technology, they require as a first step that the team writes a press release [...]

Sometimes you just have to have a little fun. Nerf arms race, anyone? A few days ago my developers explained that they were being randomly shot with nerf darts in their collocated cubicles by the QA tester. Next day, one of the mainframe developers picks up a nerf gun. The web developers were a little [...]

We’ve had an issue with one of our project builds that cruisecontrol can’t successfully checkout from CVS using maven 2. We went ahead and just manually logged into the build box and just ran a 1cvs update before each build. It works, but it’s clunky. I tried luntbuild about a month or so ago, but [...]

Peter Moore from Cenqua Software stopped by for a customer visit late last week. Turns out he’s in the Bay area for a few months and Sacramento is just a short jaunt down the road. We’ve been beta testing Crucible, their code review tool, since June. We’re pretty happy with it as it fits the [...]

Macs have been gaining a strong foothold among your leading edge developers especially in the Java world for a while, but a few nights back at the local java users group I glanced around and noticed: 3 Macbook Pros 2 Macbooks 1 iBook 2 Windows laptops Maybe Macs are crossing the chasm from innovators and [...]

A recruiter from Tek Systems attends our local Sacramento Java Users Group (SacJUG) told a humorous and depressing story. It went a little like this: HR Rep: Well, it doesn’t say here they developed any J2EE systems. External Recruiter: It says designed and implemented two large J2EE ecommerce systems. HR Rep: But that doesn’t mean [...]

Writing some initial code for a JSF TDD seminar I’m putting together for our developers I had an early test method: public void testUserCanLogin() throws Exception { User fred = new User(); fred.setName("fred"); fred.setPassword("password"); UserBean userBean = new UserBean(); userBean.setUser(fred); assertTrue(userBean.login()); } After realizing the JSF backing bean, UserBean, is actually just a page controller [...]

Last week, I finally got around to checking out Geoffrey Grosenbach’s PeepCode screencasts. Not much risk at nine bucks, I went ahead and sampled the Test First Development episode, because I’m a test first convert. I learned a lot of small points: How to easily run Rails edge for a single Rails project. Other people, [...]