I’d been tooling around looking at CVS hosting options since I’m doing some hobbyist type development with a friend. Turns out in the preface for Spring in Action, one of the authors thanks CVSDude. 2 MB and one account login for free, 200 MB and 5 accounts for $10 bucks a month, sounds about right.

I’ve been catching up with thePolymorphic Podcast. The host, Craig Shoemaker, puts on a development oriented show focused around .NET. At first I figured I’d just sample one show on Unit Testing, get an idea of whether NUnit is really any different. I figured it probably would be too .NET focused and not that interesting. As it turns out like many well rounded developers he’s more open minded about technologies even if he spends pretty much all his time doing .NET development.

It’s nice to see another former web designer make the transition to a solid software developer. I’m not sure I can claim to have ever been much of a web designer, but by the standards of ’94 and ’95 knowing the ins and outs of producing an animated gif with GifBuilder qualified you as a web guru practically.

Craig focuses on current techniques and tools such as unit testing, AJAX, and object to relational mappers. It was nice to learn during an interview that .NET developers are starting to look at design patterns and unit testing frameworks. There’s a realization that a book like Head First Design Patterns is really valuable even if all the example code is in java.

There’s some .NET specific content, I really don’t care how ASP.NET does URL rewriting for example, but in general the content and commentary more than makes up for it. Worth checking out if you like listening to development topics on your iPod.

I realized on a short trip back home, that I’ve currently adopted a habit of my Dad. He’s an electrical engineer by training, and he picked up programming pretty early on. I still remember he actually used pocket protectors, built his own television, and proudly showed me his slide rules.

Anyway as early as I can remember my father carried around a .5 mm pencil and a little 3×5 spiral notebook. Lately I found myself frustrated with trying to track things on a Palm Pilot, a Mac, and a Dell laptop that blue screens about once a day. So I reverted to a, Hipster PDA, basically a stack of 3×5 cards with my lists on them.

After 3 weeks now it’s working pretty well. Of course this means I have to admit to myself that my Dad was onto something that I largely ignored for twenty odd years.

Management wise I find that keeping my major projects on an easy to modify 3×5 cards helps me stay on top of things. When you have 5 or 6 projects that comes in pretty handy. And because they’re always in sync reviewing them a few times a day is a lot easier which means I do it more often and stay on top of things better. I struggle a bit with it when I have 8 out of 10 items done on a card and I have to move the two items to a new card manually, but it does lead to another review.

The really nice thing is when I do a weekly review of everything I can spread out all my 3×5 project cards across my desk and get a good big picture idea of where I am. And the low tech 3×5 cards and lists fit in well with Agile ideas like information radiators, CRC cards, product backlogs, and adapting to changing priorities.

In a blog interview Rick Hightower admits that he finds that ant is still ahead of market share with maven. Still he feels that Maven uses a better concept, but the implementation isn’t that great.

My experiences with Maven have been pretty negative. I’ve tried it twice in the past, because I like the concept as well. Both times before I got very far I ran into nasty exceptions and I couldn’t get any further. Despite some expressed interest none of the developers at my company have spent enough time to figure it out and try to sell the rest of us on it.

At the end of the day I only have so much time to keep up with new tools, and Ant works fine despite it’s verbosity. (Maybe Maven 2 will be really good and make me reconsider.)

Being a bit of a book nut, in an average month I devour about 3 software development titles. I do a great deal of my learning via the printed page. So I’ve never questioned the value of buying books for developers even encouraging them to order books on any development topic they’re interested in.

I remember quite a few years I had a compatriot who was given a $2000/year to spend on training and that one of his options. I remember being just a bit jealous. Anyway I vowed whenever I got the chance that I would implement a book budget for my employees. The benefits are just too obvious:

• Say an average developer orders about 1 book a month on Amazon for an average of $30. For one developer that costs you about $360 per year. Typically cheaper than a single day of vendor training or one day at a conference.
• Most of the reading will take place outside of working hours, and typically if a developer is doing some reading at work or going through examples it’s during downtime anyway.
• A book budget is a nice perk for a lot of developers and can help convince them that you really believe in investing in them.

As a last point if you’re a manager you should assume when you buy a book for someone that it’s pretty much theirs. Occasionally employees share books or pass them around, but typically they like to keep them around as personal references. If you need to buy two copies or more of something, just go ahead and do it. I’ve never seen a library type system work where the company owns the books and you have to explicitly check them out. Basically it’s just an extra layer of hassle for developers. Besides that the library space typically becomes a dumping ground for dated technical manuals and people stop even bothering to check it out.