After about 20 minutes of frustration watching Selenium tests fail to launch Firefox 2.0 sessions I found the culprit buried in the bottom of the Selenium RC FAQ:

There’s a bug (SRC-216) that prevents Firefox 2.0.0.1 or later from starting up in Selenium RC 0.9.0. Until the new version is released, please use a latest SNAPSHOT version.

The SNAPSHOT release is at 0.9.2 and the public release is at 0.9.0. 0.9.0 is about 8 months old now and the SNAPSHOT release of 0.9.2 is current as of July 7th, 2007. I think it’s time to have another public release and save some pain.

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 an employee who’s never gone to more than a few vendor sponsored training.

James McGovern has a swell idea of what’s needed:

There is no single place on the Internet where one can find a listing of all technology conferences. As one who not only speaks at conferences but also attends, a directory of sorts would be wonderful. What if we had a taxonomy where one could search for security conferences related to software development and not just infrastructure or where we can figure out which conferences are magazine sponsored vs publisher sponsored vs analyst sponsored vs software vendor sponsored and so on.

That would be great. I’m almost tempted to take a stab at it.

“Heh, can I just take this call I’ll be right back.”

I never got a chance to answer he just took the other call. Waiting patiently for about three minutes thinking should I just end the telephone screen now or be polite. I can overhear him talking to someone saying, “No big deal I’m just doing a phone interview. Yeah we can order some pizza later.” He apparently was talking on his cell and leaving me on pause on the land line.

“OK, sorry about that, I just needed to answer the call.”

Fifty or more Eclipse projects for a single medium sized web application is too many! My default rule for an application with a few hundred classes:

• Use the package system. You can keep your source code in two directories src and test.

Googling around for guidelines for projects and workspaces hasn’t revealed much. And little advice on how to refactor a nasty tangle of projects. The current plan:

1. Take the java only projects and combine the source code directories one at a time.
2. Run the tests. OK, legacy system of course very few tests to run. Will have to make do with high level smoke tests in the GUI and some manual checking.
3. Next, take the same approach with the web projects.
4. Finally, celebrate a little with a simplified project structure.

My perspective is limited to my experience. Perhaps there are great advantages to having many small projects for a small to medium sized web application. Feel free to comment with any better ideas.

Carl Quinn, a development manager at Google and a member of the Java Posse, mentioned that he spent about 50% of his time on code reviews. Google even has a special code review tool, Mondrian, developed by Guido van Rossum. The features are similar to Crucible.

Google’s warm embrace of lightweight code reviews sets a nice bar. We’ve heard for decades that code reviews or inspections are great for removing defects, keeping the code base maintainable, and mentoring. But…

• There’s no time, we have code to write.
• I have a healthy ego, I’m not comfortable with my peers giving me feedback.
• My code already works, it even passes those unit tests I wrote at the end.
• Code reviews are just about individual style, not worth the time.
• We’ll pair program then we don’t have to do code reviews. Oh, you mean I have to sit with another developer and share a machine? Let me think about those code reviews again.
• Code reviews, those aren’t Agile.

Can Google’s example win over more developers?