devSolo

As soon as I woke up from the post-codestock awesomeness at Alan Stevens’ house, I left to go on vacation with my family. We are chilling out at a hotel in Gatlinburg, TN and the WiFi finally started working. Since I’m off of work for the whole week for 4th of July shutdown inventory…. I’m gonna post as much as I can this week on the things I demo’ed for my presentation. I cannot put into words how wonderfull this CodeStock weekend has been. I met so many wonderful people and am looking soooo forward to seeing everybody again at DevLink.

Thanks everybody that learned things from my presentation Friday afternoon.
Thanks everybody that stuck it out and stayed through the whole thing even if you didn’t learn anything.
If you left early, no hard fealings, my presentation was pretty crappy, and if you feal like you could do better then I very much encourage you to do so.

I apologize to everybody that came to my presentation because I had Agile in the title and ended up focusing on the engineering side of things. Now that I’ve given the presentation I know what I need to fix and what I need to focus on. I learned more from being a speaker at CodeStock than I would ever have learned from just attending sessions. Thanks for putting up with me. And thanks especially to Michael Neel for the opportunity to present (He didn’t realize it was my first time presenting, and I assure you that he wouldn’t have let me if he knew…). And thank you Alan Stevens for making me believe that the best way I can get better in my abilities is to do my best, and not be afraid of coding in public. Not that I wanted to suck with gusto, but now I know what I need to do to not suck anymore.

And the after party tought me the importance not confusing “if you are gonna suck, do it with gusto” and “coding in public” and calling it “sucking in public”… not exactly what i meant

These are not the only people I want to thank for this opportunity, just the top of the list. The rest of the list will come as soon as my family lets go of my ear as they pull me out the door to go eat.

TortoiseSVN – Windows Explorer Shell Extension for communicating with your Subversion repositories.
http://tortoisesvn.net/downloads

VisualSVN Server – Subversion Server
http://www.visualsvn.com/server/download/

AnkhSVN – Visual Studio 2005/2008 Source Control Plugin
http://ankhsvn.open.collab.net

TeamCity – Continuous Integration / Build Management Server
http://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/download/index.html

I’ve been using Subversion(SVN) at work for any new projects that I start.  The rest of my applications are all stored in Visual SourceSafe(VSS).  I recently had to start adding some functionality to a couple of the VSS stored projects but I really wanted them to get migrated to subversion.  So after doing some non-stack overflow searches (the stack overflow searches were very very pessimistic and “i give up”ish, I found a utility to do it for me… More »

So you want to start using Source Control with all your projects.  Great idea! 

Here is a step by step howto for getting Subversion (Specifically VisualSVN 1.7.2) up and running on your computer.

More »

As long as I’ve had this WordPress blog, I’ve cringed every time I look at my URLs and see ugly query strings in every link. 

i.e. http://devSolo.com/?p=245

Where does that link go to? Who knows? I much prefer to see the link in a SEO Friendly (and very human readable):

http://devsolo.com/index.php/2009/05/what-should-the-guy-that-comes-after-me-know/

Yes, it’s longer, and not search engine friendly, but it is human readable.  It’s not search engine friendly because I didn’t use any useful keywords to start the title.  I’ll have to pay more attention to that in future articles.

Anyway,  I played around with dasBlog and BlogEngine.Net and they both generated the SEO Friendly URLs by default.  So I considered switching to BlogEngine. For some reason I assumed that if WordPress didn’t do it by default, it must not be able to.  That’s what I get for assuming.  So if you are using WordPress and would like much friendlier URLs then just change the following Setting:

1) From your management page: Select [Settings]

2) then [Permalinks]

3) then pick your prefered style.

4) Profit…

After reading the book Clean Code by Robert Martin, I am increasingly paranoid about which room is talking about me. This comic was his introduction to the introduction of the book.

I certainly hope that any programmers that look at my code would sound like the code review on the left. But of course that’s a fantasy.  I’m actually finding it a challenge balancing my goals. 

1. Make sure your code can be understood by the “guy that comes after me.”
2. Get work done!

But here is my dilemma… In using 3LA’s to make me a more productive programmer, am I making it harder for the “guy that comes after me" to follow my code? 

I think this all depends on who “the guy that comes after me” is.  This guy will most probably only know VB.  And he won’t know a unit test from a integration test.  In fact, he probably will think a test is what big companies have a dedicated department to do.  “Did you test your code?” “Yes, I clicked every button, and even made sure the program crashes gracefully.”

And what about Dependency Injection… and I’m not talking about StructureMap, NInject, Windsor, or Unity.  I mean Poor Mans Dependency Injection.  DI as a pattern, not an application. "um, whats a pattern?”. 

/facepalm, *ouch* ok I /facepalmed extra hard and knocked myself off my soapbox. (be nice)

Ok, 5 things that I would want the “guy that comes after me” to know.

1. Source Control
2. Unit Testing
3. Dependency Injection (a.k.a. Loosely coupled code)
4. Build Scripts
5. Object Oriented Programming w/ Interfaces  (shouldn’t this be assumed)

I’ll expand on these points in later posts.

All developers must watch this video and see awesomeness in action!  These guys rock.  It caused me to think about the developers that would watch it and not understand it.  Those practitioners of Mouse Driven Development. And I started making jokes at their expense while using the #pairwithus twitter tag.  Very very bad of me. Sorry guys.  I should have went to bed. 

Just remember the comments were directed at “developers” that wouldn’t understand what they were seeing.  Of course with my Expressivly Challenged Disorder, clarity is not something that comes out of me at 1am. I tend to talk in reverse sometimes.

• 
  devsolo: if ur a dev and http://vimeo.com/4110814 #pairwithus dont make you hang your head and say no no no, go away&do your mouse driven development

• 
  devsolo: #pairwithus http://vimeo.com/4110814 is like one huge insider joke

• 
  devsolo: seriously i consider #pairwithus a work of art and very well done… along the lines of the vieled rebekkah http://is.gd/rZMm (expand)

• 
  devsolo: mumble mumble mumblemumble mumble mumble mumble mumblemumble finger moving up and down over lips http://vimeo.com/4110814 #pairwithusmumble

• 
  devsolo: 90% of devs will view #pairwithus http://vimeo.com/4110814 and then their hand will go swoosh over their heads and they say duhhhhhhhhhhhhh

• 
  devsolo: i guess what i mean is http://vimeo.com/4110814 causes me to laugh and then cry wondering if i should have just cried instead #pairwithus

The top 10 people you should follow on Twitter

As is normal for lists of this nature, #10 starts the list.

#10 was Rob Enderle… I stopped reading the list at that point.