A Grande, Triple Shot, Non-Fat Core Dump by Russell Ball
I finally got around to creating an About Me page for my blog, which I've been meaning to do every since I read Jeff Atwood's commentary on it in his Thirteen Blog Cliches post. My name is Russell Ball and I am 35 years old. I currently live in Kansas City, Kansas with my wife and six year old step-daughter. I've been a developer for almost eight years. I spent 2 years with the job title of architect, but recently switched jobs so I could be a developer again because I missed coding. I've mostly ......
Raymond Chen, the mastermind behind the popular OldNewThing blog, linked to my New Employee Hall of Fame post a few days ago and my web traffic stats took a brief, meteoric spike (at least by my humble standards). I even got a few comments from readers who got errors when trying to listen to the wav file because the bandwidth limits on the google storage service that was used to host it had been exceeded. I wonder if Raymond Chen stays up at night plotting how he will next wield the power that comes ......
If you work with PowerShell and don't already have PowerTab installed, take a few minutes to download and install it now. It's a painless setup, especially if you just keep hitting enter at the prompts to accept the defaults, and the ansi-art intellisense magic just starts working everywhere without you having to learn anything. If you're still not convinced, take a minute to watch this quick flash demo. I made the mistake of thinking that I had to master the basics in PowerShell before experimenting ......
I just took this online typing test and found out that I type 73 words a minute with a 97.5 % accuracy rate, which I assume is average at best. It would be nice to be able to type faster, but I'm not going to waste any cycles trying to improve at this point because I think that typing speed means very little in the overall scheme of developer productivity. Someone who pecks away 20 words a minute but has deep technical knowledge, sound design skills, a logical thought process, and a mastery of productivity ......
It looks like I'll have a chance to test out the10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint by Guy Kawasaki next Tuesday at the next KC .NET User Group meeting where I will be giving a presentation on PowerShell. I was only recently introduced to this rule, which states that PowerPoint presentations should contain only ten slides, last no more than 20 minutes, and use no smaller than 30 point font. However, since I naturally have a small attention span when it comes to presentations that aren't concise, I was immediately ......
A new employee on the networks side started earlier this week and has already been nominated to the new employee hall of fame based on this voice message that he left on his boss's phone on the morning of his second day. Apparently he had a little incident with the alarm system and calmly explains his predicament to his boss on the message as the siren is wailing in the background. It has been a great source of entertainment in the department all morning. Enjoy. My boss was kind enough to secure ......
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 my efforts. How did I do this last month? First, I accomplished one major thing that wasn't even on my radar screen when I came up with my goal list. I resigned my position as an architect ......
In my recent post on code quality, I mentioned some of the high level features of a static analysis tool called NDepend. I've been exploring some of the pre-built CQL (Code Query Language) queries in the tool by running them against the WatiN codebase. Here are the results from selecting "Types with Too Many Methods" query. NDepend shows you a list of the classes and number of methods in each on the left along with a visual Tree Map visual representation on the bottom. Once code is analyzed while ......
Dear Google Recruiters, Here is my answer to one of your interview questions that was posted by Tihomir Nakov. Question: Every man in a village of 100 married couples has cheated on his wife. Every wife in the village instantly knows when a man other than her husband has cheated, but does not know when her own husband has. The village has a law that does not allow for adultery. Any wife who can prove that her husband is unfaithful must kill him that very day. The women of the village would never ......
I knew that SQL Server 2005 had structured exception handling, but for some reason I assumed that you could only use it within CLR sprocs. Since I still haven't actually heard of anyone using CLR sprocs for anything other than demos or sample projects (at least not without being pummeled by hoards of angry DBA's), I mostly ignored this new feature until now. Today I worked on a sproc that involved over a dozen DML statements (it was a utility sproc to handle security and setup steps for developers ......
Monitoring and enforcing code quality seems to be somewhat of a holy grail in the software industry in that nearly every development shop pursues this goal but few ever even come close to actually achieving it. Here are a few of the common failed approaches I've seen: Developer's Handbook - Despite being a darling of auditors, I find this approach to be a largely worthless exercise for anyone except perhaps the author of the document. Like all waterfall-based functional specifications, these documents ......
Here are a few scenes from the first day at my new job: My welcome kit consists of a coffee mug, a pen, and a DVD of the Big Lebowski. My new boss is a huge fan of this movie and several technical artifacts and regular meetings are named after characters and scenes. As we are leaving for a group lunch, I quickly run back to my desk because I remember some friendly warnings about what happens to people who forget to lock their computers. Apparently any of a number of fetish sites is likely to be prominently ......
I used Resharper's unit-test runner for the first time while spelunking WatiN last week and quickly became a fan. If unit-test runners were high school boys, here are a few reasons why the Resharper test runner would be dating the entire cheer leading squad while the NUnit test runner would have to bribe a distant, homely cousin in order to get a prom date. Integrated IDE experience: I think NUnit is good for deployment scenarios when you just want to load the test dll and verify the environment, ......
Participating in the open source community and becoming an avid code reader were two themes in my six month roadmap to becoming a better developer. I made progress in both of these areas in the last few days by downloading and exploring the source code for WatiN, an open source library that I have used recently for creating automated web tests. I still have quite a bit more exploring to do before I'll fully grok how WatiN works, but I thought I would share a few of the code reading techniques that ......
In the Agile community, a war room refers to a team room where developers work, customer meetings take place, and all projected related information is displayed. It is supposed to maximize communication and transparency into the health of the project. I think one sign of a healthy agile project is evidence of some good fun. These are pictures taken from a war room at the bank where I am currently wrapping up my near six year tenure. These guys have obviously taken the war room to a whole new level. ......
Welcome to the 2nd installment of the monthly Caffeinated Codey awards. As I mentioned in the first installment, the lucky winners will receive a caffeinated or alcoholic beverage of their choice if we should ever meet. Of course, when when I first made the offer I assumed this was mostly an empty threat, however it looks like this opportunity could present itself next month for at least five of the winners since Ayende Rahien, Justice Gray, Scott Bellware, David Laribee, and Jeremy Miller are all ......