Back from another fun weekend that consisted of a couple of 6 hour car trips with a bored 7 year old and a screaming 6 month old with a bad case of explosive diarrhea. All this just to visit in-laws in a nursing home located in the booming metropolis that is West Plains, MO. What [...]
Browsing Posts published in September, 2008
This is part two of my quest to convince Jurgen and his fellow judges that I should be the one who gets to blow the $100 dollar Amazon gift certificate on cool Software Development books. In part one, I approached the question backwards by describing seven motivational anti-patterns. Now I’ll focus on the positive and [...]
I’ve decided to take a 2 part stab at answering Jurgen’s question about what motivates me in the work place. To start with, I decided to meditate on a few things that tend to grab my motivation by the metaphorical gonads and squeeze. In no particular order… Sunshine-Up-the-Arse Speeches – Luckily these are most decidedly [...]
Question: What’s worse than the stomach flu? Answer: Having your wife and 6 month old get sick at the same time and having it all happen on the same weekend as your parents visit from out of town. Despite these horrors, I’m back and ready for business with my second Triple Shot installment. Win $100 [...]
I decided that I liked the concept of sharing some of my favorite links each week along with my witty banter, but that I don’t particularly like the format offered by the Feedburner-Delicious integration service. I especially don’t like how there is no way to leave comments and it is not available to people who [...]
In the spirit of LEAN and attempting to trim waste from existing processes, I’ve been pondering the optimal amount of effort to spend doing mockups lately. By mockups, I just mean a quick and dirty approximation of what the GUI will look like once development is complete. Mockups are usually considered disposable artifacts that are [...]
I recently read Jurgen Appelo’s post, Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last, and then Ted Neward’s somewhat harsh response, From the “You Must Be Trolling for Hits” Department…. Although both posts rang true when highlighting the various problems that occur when developers are deficient in either knowledge or experience, I don’t think either post pursued [...]
Someone (Max) finally pegged me with this old tech meme that has been floating the blogosphere forever. I decided to be a good sport about it, so here’s the whole seedy story of how I got started in the industry. How old were you when you started programming? Although I do remember spending several hours [...]
Everyone has memories of certain formative experiences that seemed to mark the end of naive adolescence and the beginning of cynical adulthood. When I think back over my career as a software developer, I realize that I’ve had several experiences that taught me some hard and valuable lessons about the art and science of software [...]
I was doing some spring cleaning on my blog this last weekend and decided to review and refactor my category list. Categorization of posts is probably not something that most bloggers bother to spend much time thinking about. I’m sure there are a few anal retentive souls out there that do this on a regular [...]
