I’ve been doing the equivalent of a mental exercise program for about 10-20 minutes a day for the last few weeks on lumosity.com. I’ve always believed that I’ve had some degree of control over my overall mental acuity. For example, I naturally assumed that choosing to read instead of watching TV would help stem the [...]
Browsing Posts in Continuous Improvement
When I first started writing this blog, I devoted several posts to planning and describing my efforts to become a better developer. Although I was inspired by a certain unnamed developer’s public quest to read a book a week for six months, I never chose reading technical books as one of my goals. I’m not [...]
Here is a list of what I would most like to learn in the coming year. StructureMap – This is the one new technology that I will likely be able to implement at work in the first quarter, so I made it first on my list. I’ve been using the Dependency Injection pattern on an [...]
This is the sequel to my Seven Things I Did Right in 2007 post. Now I am going to cover the “Stop Doing” and “Start Doing” categories of my agile retrospective format. What I want to start doing in 2008 Become a Committer on an Open Source Project- I took a few steps towards open [...]
I know this is rather late in January to be doing this, but I’ve been rather distracted with the blog migration and this was one of several posts that’s been languishing in a half-finished state in my drafts folder for the last several weeks. Instead of doing the typical new year’s resolution list full of [...]
Don’t get excited. This is not a geek version of the “Birds and the Bees” talk. I just finished reading another excellent scientific paper called The Expert Mind, which I discovered through one of Jean-Paul Boodhoo’s posts. The article examines the question of whether experts are born or made and offers some interesting insights into [...]
A psychology study entitled Unskilled And Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Leads To Inflated Self-Assessments opens with the following amusing anecdote: In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was arrested later that night, less than [...]
I was setting up Cruise Control the other day and trying to figure out why it wasn’t working on a certain source control folder. I noticed a strange error in the cruise control log about there being an invalid character in the path, so I decided to take advantage of the fact that it is [...]
I seem to have kicked into a professional goal setting mode lately and fixated on a number of ambitious goals, such as publishing technical articles, speaking at major conferences, and creating my own version 1.0 software. Although I feel invigorated by the challenge posed by these new goals, I also have the nagging feeling that [...]
It’s been two months since I set out on my 6 month self-improvement plan to being a better developer. During my last one month update, I set out some specific goals for month two that involved learning about Resharper, NDepend, F#, the Windsor Container, and the ROTOR codebase and then writing some blog posts about [...]
