We have just moved our offices from the Vienna, Virginia area to downtown Washington DC. We now have more space for our team room and have tried new strategies to minimize wiring and optimize communication across the team. Here is a picture of 2 pairing stations in the new team room. The desks are part...

At 5:00am on Saturday morning, I headed in to downtown DC to get some prizes and a few books from the Thycotic office. Then off to collect Ryan Olshan at 5:30, and John Morales at 5:45. We hit 95 and headed south for Richmond. The drive was uneventful with most of us still in pre-coffee haze and Bob...

Thycotic is sponsoring our first ever vendor booth at the Verify 2006 Conference in Crystal City, VA (Washington DC Metro Area). The conference is all about testing, testing frameworks and tools but from a quality assurance and developer perspective. Thycotic is well versed in testing since we practice...

As developers, we pride ourselves on our analytical skills and being able to quickly deduce a problem. Being “engineers” and “craftsmen” we use tools to gain insight and learn about a problem while we determine our diagnosis. Every now and then, the tools fail. This evening I...

ShorterSigs is a new service from Thycotic Software which solves the problem of communicating relevant contact information (and even your photo!) without cluttering up your email messages. This is just what every techie needs whether posting to forums, newsgroups or just a friendly chat among your peers...

I will be presenting on Test Driven Development at the CMAP Architect Group in Maryland. Session details and directions here . Abstract: TDD is hard. It is hard because we have to unlearn the way many of us have always coded. Instead we have to start writing unit tests and what is more; we have to write...

I have been asked a number of times in the last few years if I think TDD (Test Driven Development) will go mainstream. Firstly, we need to agree on what mainstream is – Wikipedia does not give any hard numbers ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream ) but it seems like 20% would be a good number...

Do you breathe agile? Do your progress bars always turn green? Do you refactor in your sleep? Then I need you for the agile track … We are looking for attendees, speakers and volunteers! This is the first Mid-Atlantic Code Camp to have an official Agile track (and I am the track chair –...

John Morales has a great post on understanding complexity and how to think about difficult concepts. I think John hits on a key concept in the idea of "good code" while I realize it wasn't the main focus of his post: good code is simple for everyone (the team in question) to understand. I think this...

Many developers in our industry prefer a dark corner to the presentation podium. This is often explained away with references to introverted personalities and geekish tendencies. While this may be true for certain individuals, there are definitely many benefits to breaking away from this stereotype....