Musings of a Software Development Manager

I took an opportunity to head down to OSCON a week or so ago on a free expo pass. I always wanted to attend OSCON up in Portland, but I never had the opportunity to go. Anyway I invited another developer along and made the morning drive down to San Jose amid unusually light traffic. [...]

A core part of Scrum and many other Agile methodologies is ‘inspect and adapt.’ Retrospectives are a key practice in reviewing the last iteration. You toss up on stickies or a white board the ‘What Went Well’ and ‘What To Look Into.’ Diana Larsen held a session at the end of Agile Open California on [...]

A single number representing whether you’re six months worth of coding is actually not crap. Not code coverage, Checkstyle warnings or defects per thousand lines of code but a single score. Alberto Savio of Agitar Software presented on his new Crap4J tool at an Agile Open California session this week. Crap4J produces a single number [...]

I’m off to my first open space conference later this month at Open Agile California. Should be a great chance to recharge some batteries and talk about issues with sustaining agile. I know after three years of Agile and two years of our official effort that we no longer do a lot of questioning and [...]

Are you kidding? Perfect reason to get a training request turned down. Don’t help me out with an elaborate giveaway.

Hunting through conference sites and googling away to decide what conferences make the most sense for a given employee? How about Web Design World, OSCON, RailsConf, a No Fluff Just Stuff Seminar, JavaOne, SD West? I put special emphasis on growing my employees vision of their job and a conference can be eye opening for [...]

Google Developer Day was a good experience for a free event. It’s always nice to see how software development shops go out of their way to make for happy developers. There were plenty of good snacks, bean bag chairs, reasonable wireless, a foosball table and pool table. I snagged two pretty nice T-shirts and they [...]

Two days at the San Jose Tech Museum hearing about Ruby rejuvenated the old cranium. Just in time since I had spent the previous day doing about 14 hours of troubleshooting on some Enterprise software. The conference had somewhere above 100 attendees (I didn’t count). It was all in one big hall on the first [...]

Josh Susser gave a pointed talk on how you can contribute to Rails, or really any other open source project for that matter. Why Contribute? Maybe there’s the guilt associated with the freeloader effect that drives you to contribute. Guilt is never the strongest motivation though. Better motivations include getting some measure of control over [...]

Someone asked me if Twitter was TCP or UDP. UDP, it’s definately UDP. I can’t talk about the numbers, but UDP. – Blaine Cook Scaling Twitter talk at 2nd Annual Silicon Valley Ruby Conference Blaine talked about dealing with traffic on the busiest Rails based site. His comment was related to their use of DRB [...]