Wayne Allen's Weblog : Misc

The Last Language War / Language Trolling Post You'll Ever Need To Read (Hopefully)

Wayne Allen — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:56:00 GMT

This post by David is hilarious (warning programmer humor...)

Excerpts from The Deadline – Tom DeMarco

Wayne Allen — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 23:19:00 GMT

I had never read "The Deadline" by DeMarco, but it turned up on my boss' desk one day and I borrowed it.

I thought it was an enjoyable read and only violently disagreed with his attempt to say that if we would just do more up-front design everything would be better (High-performance projects spend proportionately far more of their time in design).

Four Essentials of Good Management: (p.28)
Safety and Change (p.35)
Negative Reinforcement (p.46)
The Manager’s Essential Body Parts (p.59)
Battle Command As a Metaphor for Management (p.69)
Interviews and Hiring (p.69)
Productivity Improvement (p.83)
Risk Management (p.83)
Playing Defense (p.93-94)
Modeling and Simulation of the Development Process (p.115)
Pathological Politics (p.131-132)
Metrics (p.149-150)
Process and Process Improvement (p.161-162)
Changing the Way Work Gets Done (p.179-180)
The Effects of Pressure (p.199)
The Angry Manager (p. 209-210)
Ambigous Specification (p. 216)
Conflict (p. 225)
Roll of the Catalyst (p. 238)
Human Error (p.246)
Staff Level (p. 260)
Project Sociology (p. 275)
Pathological Politics (Again) (p. 288)
Lean and Mean (p. 299)
Radical Common Sense (p. 302)

The Additional Software Tester's Axiom

Wayne Allen — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 23:09:00 GMT

My co-worker Dustin pointed this post out to me with the following addition.

Axiom VI: Testing? What testing?

HanselMinutes #4

Wayne Allen — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 17:04:00 GMT

Scott Hanselman has started a podcast called HanselMinutes to talk tools and utilities. Episode #4 on Continuous Integration caught my attention because of 2 names mentioned during the discussion of the Ruby Watir library. Both Dustin Woodhouse and Travis Illig got mentioned because of tools they have written to integrate the Watir functionality at development or test time. Travis wrote RubyTestExecutor which hooks Ruby/Watir scripts up with NUnit. Dustin wrote WatirNUt which is a utility that creates a portable, testable NUnit binary wrapper around Watir test scripts and supporting files.

These two individuals and their tools are interesting to me because they both work on teams I manage and I'm excited to see my guys pushing the envelope.

Scott was also kind enough to mention me as one of the local XP experts (my 30 seconds of podcast fame).

Speaking at SAO 11/30/05

Wayne Allen — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 21:36:00 GMT

For those of you in the Portland, OR metro area you might be interested in attending the SAO Developers SIG on Wednesday Nov 30, 2005 at 7:30am. The topic will be Agile Development - The Academic and Industry Perspectives. I will be sharing the stage with Ward Cunningham and Greg Rose. My topic will be "The Agile Customer". Hope to see you there.

Why Don't You Take Vacation?

Wayne Allen — Sat, 12 Nov 2005 00:26:00 GMT

Recently I have run into a number of people, both employees and consultants who can’t seem to separate themselves from their work while on vacation. This behavior is extremely mystifying to me. A related phenomenon is people who won’t/don’t use their vacation. I’ve identified 4 personalities that exhibit these tendencies.

William the Worker doesn’t have a separate identity from his work identity and feels lost doing something different than work tasks.
Essential Ellen believes that without her things will fall apart.
Charlie the Consultant feels the need to work wherever he is because of the financial pressures of hours not worked being hours not billed.
Hacker Helen loves her work so much she’d rather do it that anything else and typically works at home after work for "fun" regularly and vacations are no different.

Are you William, Ellen, Charlie or Helen? How do you justify working on vacation or not taking your vacation?

Presenting TDD at Code Camp 2005 in Portland, OR

Wayne Allen — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:26:00 GMT

I'll be presenting a session on TDD at the 2005 Portland, OR Code Camp on July 23 at 11:15am.

London Bound

Wayne Allen — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 23:44:00 GMT

I'll be in London next week (6/19-6/24) so if anyone wants to get together in the evening drop me a line.

International Addresses

Wayne Allen — Mon, 02 May 2005 16:20:00 GMT

Darrell pointed me to this site on International Addresses and the complexities therein.

Darrell is using this from a testing point of view, but I have been fascinated for years about how to design an effective solution for US based systems that need to deal with foreign addresses. This will be a great resource.

HDD DVD to Spell the End of Big Media as we know it?

Wayne Allen — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 17:48:00 GMT

Mike Rogers writes about how HDD DVD will change everthing.