Arjan’s World

After a day off from blogging it’s good to see a lot of fresh content having arrived. Topics are quite inspirational, hovering around honest, learning, and the willingness to self-improve. Good stuff!

• Did I Actually Write That? – Jim Holmes
  ‘ (…) this is the hard one, be open about the mistakes you’ve made. Check your ego at the door(which is a hard thing), because your openness will benefit your entire team and your project ‘
• LINQ, group by and WPF Data Binding – R. Stropek
  ‘ WPF Data Binding works great with LINQ! This article shows how to create a hierarchical result set by using LINQ’s group by clause and how to consume it in WPF data binding ‘
• Performing Code Katas – Sergio Pereira
  ‘ (…) although practicing the Katas by yourself, in your spare time, is valuable, presenting your routine to an audience can deliver even more results ‘
• Introduction to NHibernate: CRUD and Basic Transparent Cascading (Part 3) – DimeCasts.Net Details for # 54
  These days, NHibernate seems to be everywhere . Which is a good thing, certainly if you never encountered an Object/Relational mapper before
• The Culture Chart – Rands In Repose
  couple days old, but AFAIK I don’t see ‘Rands’ being covered anywhere I see, so here goes. He always has excellently written posts from a manager’s side of development
• How To: How to Use Dropbox as the Ultimate Password Syncer – Adam Pash
  Using Dropbox for some time now. It never shows any hiccup, and in case of synchronisation issues, you still have your local copy; so your never locked out of your data
• Are Your Developers Goofing Off? – Eric Spiegel
  ‘ (…) is it realistic to expect that chit chat won’t happen during the day? And why is it that managers have a sixth sense about dropping by when chit chat is in full progress? ‘ Good question. It’s a big difference between innocuous chatting every now and then, and surfing the intertubes whole days for procrastination purposes. Eric has a couple very interesting observations, and a completely unexpected encounter with a former employee’s work ethic
• Agile Software Development: Large Agile Projects Require Some New Skills
  ‘ A common question is how to run large agile projects? Answer: You don’t! You break them into multiple small projects ‘ (emphasis mine)
• Continuous Improvement – One Developers Journey – Tim Barcz
  ‘ When I came I brought along of ideas and practices that were new to the development team. The usage of an IoC container (Windsor), ORM (NHibernate), a build server, unit-testing to name a few ‘
• *** Lesson 2 of 3 from “The Big Moo”: They Say I’m Extreme – Brian di Croce
  ‘ It’s important that you realize when “enough is enough” and realize that your integrity and credibility is on the line every time you’re doing something that violates your set of values and principles ‘
  Thanks Brian! Today I feel especially inspired by They say: “Plan it”. I say, “Do It”
• The value of infrastructure – Alkampfer
  ‘ The infrastructure of a project is really important for a lot of reasons (…) ‘
• Advantages of TDD – Mark Levison
  Honest in the sense that it also explains the big hurdle that TDD poses for beginners
• Interview developers for the right fit – Maggie Longshore
  Maggie highlights experiences and lessons learned in getting the right candidate aboard
• Acceptable test failures – Jimmy Bogard
  ‘ When tests fail, and not because of an assertion failure, it’s a smell that I need to write another test. I then need to go back and ensure my test can fail for the reasons I specify, and only then do I have a valid test ‘
• Geeks – Let’s Band Together to Help End Poverty – Dana Coffey
  Here is one contribution to the Blog Action Day
• How You Can Code Global Poverty Away – Max Pool
  And another one ‘ Many small hands move mountains, but small hands with the power of the internet can change the world ‘
• Remembering – Kathleen Dollard
  ‘ Whatever you believe about [ed: big set of politically inflammatory subjects to some] make your decisions looking into yourself and ensuring there is no trace of hate or a bias that degrades you. I do not ask that you agree with me. I ask that you come to you choices without hate ‘ While the post has a truely Christian connotation, everyone can learn a big lesson here: hate starts small, slowly smothering away until the right (wrong?) moment to erupt in a sudden and extreme way. No matter how young they are, I try to teach my children to always treat others in a fair way, not gossiping behind their backs, and about the need to respect people who are different from us
• How to Cross the Chasm – Chris Spagnuolo
  ‘ Very simply, the early adopters represent a very small portion of the market, and you can’t make a business by selling just to them. To be a successful, you need to cross the chasm and sell to the mainstream ‘
• resharper-tdd-productivity-plugin – Google Code
  Resharper plugin to streamline Test Driven Development practices
  looks interesting! via Friendfeed / Steven Harman
• Are You Actually A Post-Agilist? – Alan Skorkin
  A…what?
  via Friendfeed / Scott Koon (someone tell me why it is not possible to link to a Friendfeed item directly)
• Why Doing Business Like a Guy Isn’t So Bad, Either – Kristen Fischer
  Continuation from last month’s installment why doing business like a girl isn’t bad
• Strategies for Scaling Agile Software Development – Scott Ambler
  ‘ Instead of comparing velocities you instead calculate the acceleration of each team. For example, consider the reported velocities of each team (…) ‘
• T4 (Text Template Transformation Toolkit) Code Generation – Best Kept Visual Studio Secret – Scott Hanselman
  ‘ T4 is a code generator built right into Visual Studio. To be clear, you HAVE THIS NOW on your system… go play ‘
  Ah, nice to know certainly! Rob Conery has more information
• Blog Action Day Reminder, Plus the Little Book of Productivity – Leo Babauta
  So, after *my* blogging hiatus yesterday, today, Oct 15, is Blog Action Day… so go write something about povery today. I refered you to it, so that frees me from writing myself