Unequally Yoked - Reminder

An individual's personality affects his ability to perform particular job assignments: One of the bullets was ..... The best programmer was put in charge of a team of beginners. Not having the patience to tutor his people, he changed their code in the middle of the night! Although his designs were wonderful, his team neither enjoyed working with him nor learned much about programming.

Page 45 in Agile Software Development - Alistair Cockburn

Motivational Quote On Permission

Once again, I find myself pointing to the keyboard and saying get back to work and do your job the way you know you need to. Stop letting them make you compromise so much. Prove to them why you are so valuable and stop marching according to their defined instruction. Be the expert at how to do your job and manage your craft!

By Kevin Schlabach

Responsive Design - Interesting

One of the things I really appreciate about Kent Beck is that he constantly is thinking about how people do things, especially in programming software. He does not seem to take for granted anything related to how we work. Always wanting to look deeper and find out why and how we as programmers do our work then he tries to articulate what he has learned for others to learn from and build on. A couple of examples of his sharing are Extreme Programming (XP) and Test Driven-Development (TDD). In recent, years Kent has been studying and researching Design.

Here is an article summarizing some of his thoughts about Responsive Design.

Definitely, food for thought. I look forward to more information on his research and results.

Version Control By Example - Cool

Appreciation of good and pedagogical examples is one of my Learning Languages. A while back I came upon this website that offers a free book on version control. Everything from VCS (SVN) to DCS like Git and Mercurial is touched on in this document.

I have a quick link to Version Control By Example when I want to share Version Control or to learn something new. I even keep a pdf version on my laptop. Have a look and see if it is useful to you.

Error Prevention

Michael Feathers gave this presentation two years ago and I just got around to listening to it. This is a nice summary of a handful of techniques (like Test Driven Development and Design By Contract for example) you may have heard of but never understood what they do.

He asks in the end why don't we use them more and what do they have in common?

It is worth listening to and following his slides below the video. One slide that surprised me was a study by Caper Jones showing that the defect rate by language went down as the language became a higher level language (or more OO and Functional). Assembly and C had the highest rate of defects for the ones studied.

The Ethics Of Error Prevention - Michael Feathers