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If You Had 6 Months To a Sudden Death…
This is a concept I have been pondering lately (and not just from a personal perspective). To be clear on the concept, here’s the idea: what would you do differently right now, if you knew in 6 months you would be killed in an accident (and not a terminal illness)?
Personally the answer that we all come up tends to be the same. Spend more time with family and friends. Have more fun. Maybe, join a religion or get deeper in the one that you subscribe to(you gotta worry about the afterlife if you believe in one.. which obviously I do)....
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clientscript as the view controller
I’m finalizing my demos for next week’s talk at the Tampa ASP.NET MVC user group. I’m also in the midst of a deploy to our test servers of among other things a page that is an experimental architecture for me and my team. I was talking with my boss (Perry for those of you who attend Tampa UX). He had to do a little touch up on my quickly thrown together UI. He told me after playing with it that he really liked how it performs and even how it works. He thinks it’s a pretty good UX.
It’s actually very...
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What is UX (User Experience)?
(and should I be afraid to talk at a user group that has UX as its focus)..
UX or User Experience or User Experience Design is a pretty hot topic right now… well in some circles. In other circles its a feared topic. Oftentimes when I ask someone to speak at my group Tampa UX, I get a response like “Isn’t that just for designers? I’m a developer, you don’t really want me there.” I usually end up coaching the speaker on what they should and should not do. Along the way I find that I have to explain what I’m...
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Web state backup/restore..
This is an item that i just thought of that is on my wish list of tools to find. i’m sure that if you maintain a web site of any size you have a service that emails you errors or logs them into a database or there is a combination log with an emailed report. At my day job we have something like this. We have a couple issues where we have no idea what they are. Mainly because data can change a lot in this particular area, but we’re not 100% sure that this is the case. ...
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Test Driven Development (TDD) or Behavior Driven Development (BDD)
[Sorry it’s been a long day and this is a rather stream of consciousness post... ] If you have followed my blogging for any length of time you’ve seen me jousting (sometimes shouting) with the Agile crowd of Testing First. Actually I think my complaints have been more in line with some of the nuances of their architectural advice. We won’t get into that arena right now though. [Digging out my best Katy Perry voice] So, I tried BDD and I liked it Yep, you heard me right. Not only that by I...
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Dear Google/Live Search/Yahoo Search/And anyone else
I have been a big fan of your services for a long time and have used each of you off and on. Google right now you have my business and that ad revenue you currently get from me using your search may be in jeopardy. The first one of you to ban (yes, ban!) people like Experts-exchange or SqlServerCentral from all searches where I am looking for a tech answer will get my business... Seriously, they are a bane to your business as they pollute the search results. Whenever I click on a link that implies that there...
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Getting the "unwashed" (aka "blue collar coders") to unit test
Roy Osherove has a great post on making TDD more accessible (which I would be remiss to mention that I am not really a part of the TDD movement except as a outsider/skeptic). There are a bunch of additional comments/posts in this regard which I won’t bore you with. You either got here because my post got linked to Roy’s thread or you are a regular reader here. I was actually encouraged by Roy’s thoughts(again). He really gets it (I mean the reason why blue collar developers don’t do TDD). It’s all reminiscent of something I...
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Why I am one of the worst programmers on the planet (in some circles)?
First of all, we had a great turn out at the first TUX (Tampa User eXperience) User Group last night (more on that in another post... I’m still pretty exhausted). I got to meet someone last night that I have maligned (sort of) in my blog. I hope he took my comment in the levity that it was meant to be taken. I told him that "everything is your fault" once you leave. It’s an adage that I have told others and it is very true. It’s easy for the new guy to come in and say... all...
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GrDD Refactored...
You probably think that GrDD AKA "Git 'R Done" development is a joke. And in some respects it is, but the concepts behind it are not. I have been talking to some friends and I think I have a pretty good idea of what we are talking about. Now mind you I’m not a methodology guy. I want to stress that. I’m just trying to get this out of my system.
Before I proceed, I know there are some "agilists" out there who are subscribed because they can’t wait to pounce on an idea that is counter to their ideas (and...
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Red Gate & Reflector: My Concerns...
Ok, before I start off I want to note that Red Gate is one of our "Friends of TRT," so they show up on just about every page of the site (and would appear in every RSS if I had the time to figure out how to do it). I also want to note that I know that I am breaking a rule with this post and may alienate a vendor, but this needs to be said (and sometimes I can’t resist). I love Red Gate tools. Their commercial stuff is absolutely awesome, and I mean that. If you...
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Writing Better JS Components
Perry (my boss... a developer/manager... he codes and manages) and I have been having a recurring conversation lately. One that keeps bringing to my mind a product that I knew about when I worked for ZAC Catalogs (way back in the day). I would daresay that none of you had even heard of it (although we did pick it up as a result of Xtras carrying it, so maybe a few of you knew about it). I believe it was a called "MFC DataGrid Wizard" or something like that. Anyway what it did was build a custom DataGrid component for...
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MS MVC Thoughts
[NOTE: I haven’t quite had much of a chance to look at the new Preview 4, so take this as someone nearly informed. I haven’t read about anything in the Preview 4 that changes what I’m going to say. Also, remember that I am the admin/editor of the blog site which is Alt Alt.NET... so testability/mockabilty doesn’t really resonate with me.] I know it’s shocking that I would have something to weigh in on MS MVC, but I do. For those who don’t know. I took some issue with Ayende’s "leaky abstraction" back in my CodeBetter days (they had...
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An Answer to my post for young programmers
My good buddy (actually my best friend from High School), "The Witt" complained that I wasn’t being helpful to programmers who are trying to learn the craft when I posted two weekends ago on "A Question you should ask when hiring a non-entry level developer." (OK, he wasn’t the only one... but, hey, we have a history, so he can get me to post a response, and you can’t... deal...) I decided that our subsequent conversation in email would make a good followup post for those who want to know what they should be doing, and with his...
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A Question you should ask when hiring a non-entry level developer
And I mean every developer. If you are an entrepreneur and you are hiring a consultant to work on your hot idea you need to do this. It could cost you everything if you don’t. I recently took on a side project. It’s a return to a project I did 2 years ago. Since I have worked on it there have been at least 2 other people on the project. I’m writing this for the Business Development guy (the guy I assume hired the other folks). I am not writing this to "cut" on the other developer (I am...
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To Cache, To Static, or To Session "When?" is the question
DonXML has an interesting article over here that got me thinking about a technique I have been using for years now, and I’m not sure I’ve seen much written about it. The basic tenet begins like this: I avoid session like the plague (not sure why except I have visions of some abuses I have seen... like full DataTable’s stored in session). The only time and I mean the ONLY TIME I use Session is if I have a value that needs to be associated with a user across the WHOLE site. As a result I really try to...
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Silverlight2 Programming: The Designer Rule
I’m starting a new series on Silverlight2. I am currently building a little SL2 prototype, and as I am learning things I thought I would write them down here. The first rule deals with working with Designers. It is stated as such. "Prefer XAML code to CLR/DLR code when it comes building interfaces" Note the word "prefer" here. That word means "usually", "normally", or "unless there is an exception." This is best explained by some C# code I saw the other day. It looked something like this: ...
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Composition vs. Inheritance...
[I really should stay out of these discussions... I really should, but I can’t resist.] The other day I saw an article on Composition over Inheritance (I forget where I saw it). The article did a good job of explaining what "composition" is. This is my simplistic understanding (which means that someone will probably come in and tell me I have it ALL wrong... what else is new?): "composition" means essentially wrapping objects instead of direct inheritance (so instead of inheriting from X you instead have a private instance of X in your class that you use, but you...
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Is it 80% and 20% or is 20% too high...
A bit of Philosophy from me today. I saw a couple posts recently that have had me thinking about something I've felt for awhile. And not to go all elitist on you, but I want you dear reader to think about this.
The title of this post references a Coding Horror post called "The Two Types of Programmers." Like myself Jeff is a bit of a philosopher (sometimes maybe too much for his own good).
Anyway, Jeff got a lot of readers riled up by this post. So today I also saw this post by ALT.NETer Phill Haacked entitled "Composition over Inheritance...