Communicating Email Efficency

Always use caution with email. Even an innocent signature line communicating the fastest way to reach you can be misconstrued.

I read Tim Ferris’s book a few months ago. Many different ideas on how to be more effective using less time. I tested out the idea of batching email and only checking it twice [...]

Moving a Team to Journeyman Developers

Fred George has broken developers into three broad groups of apprentices, journeymen, and masters. Based on this classification our team is moving from apprentice to journeymen currently.

He defines apprentice level programmers as:

An apprentice in OOP is a effective programmer and can construct loops, methods, and classes, but is still learning how to separate [...]

Second Sacramento Ruby User Group Meeting

Sacramento’s Ruby community is beginning to organize for regular meetings. Our first meeting about three months ago was more of a introduction and chat session. Several members had been to Rails Conf 2007 and had plenty to talk about.

We met again at Invision in Old Sacramento and talked about some organizational items:

Ryan is [...]

Learning In Tests

I was testing a method that did some validation of a 2 character state. It’s legacy code, very few tests so I’m learning about how the code really works as I go along. I was writing a test for the following line:

else if (!BasicUtils.isState(state.trim()))

I wrote a test set the state property to “AA” [...]

Average Developers and Agile

When you do Agile development you really need good people otherwise things won’t work. And my answer is have you ever seen a waterfall project delivering good software by putting baboons on it and giving them bananas.

This average thing is completely wrong. To produce software you anyway need good developers no matter what. You [...]