Have you ever known someone like this? Maybe it was a child: “Well, I was making tomato soup and I saw the bananas sitting there, and thought they’ll just go to waste. So I sliced them up in the soup! Then, remembering I had some cheese and sausage and pickled herring left from that party […]
Ok I decided yet an foray into speech-to-text software. I am seeing what exactly I can just do with it and honestly, the idea of being a poor man’s Tony Stark is just too cool to pass up. Well, I guess his commands are like “computer, reconfigure titanium actuator motors” and mine would just be […]
I’ve been talking with recruiters as the economy has picked up a bit and there’s something different that has happened in the last few years. Notably, its the treatment that we the developers get when trying to do business with these salespeople. The treatment has become very much more poor, almost abusive, in many ways. […]
Recently I was helping out a team that was on a death march. They had all the great things a high energy project requiring dedicated developers employs into the project methodology: Unpaid overtime, lots of it. Moratorium on vacation time – none allowed. Vacation time does not roll over at year end. Mandatory weekends and […]
One thing I love about Agile is the amount of time spent in meetings. Lots. On many teams we instituted a “no-afternoon” meeting rule too. There are stats that will tell you even a single IM interruption will take up to 25 minutes to recover from (you’d better look that up). These days our Shift […]
Last year I was working at Huge Company, Inc. and they were trying to implement some agile. I was brought in as one of those stack lead developers — domain, UI, smile, do a jig etc. But soon I found myself leading two development/qa teams and kinda of a nightmare on my hands — top-down […]
If you’ve ever had to work on a legacy application with a HUGE code base, you might get faced with this situation: Manager: “Hey journeyman can you fix this address on this page so that it knows to take a system configuration?” Journeyman: “Sure, give me a second for an estimate.” You find the code: […]
I read articles on Tech Republic from time to time. They’re . . . . OK. But I don’t remember signing up for this kind of email notification. You’d think a self proclaimed tech site would show a little more ethical behavior. Just goes to show you, their opinions are motivated. Here’s my recent inbox. […]
I had to write an Oracle script template for work to kind of create a guideline for our developers since we are getting inputs from ourselves, DBA standards, and business requirements from our BA’s and customers. Anyway, one thing they wanted was batch commits . . . so I wrote this quick little piece: It […]
I was creating a setup of PortableApps on my XP machine with some of the great stuff you can port around in that framework: Open Office, VLC etc. without installing them into the OS. I didn’t have a USB drive with me, and thought hey, maybe I can just make a virtual drive from a […]