Jonathan Cogley's Blog

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 Marley playing.  We got to the Code Camp at the ECPI center well before the kickoff time and claimed our hard earned coffee and bagels (outstanding cream cheese from Panera!).

I will be presenting two sessions at the Richmond Code Camp tomorrow:

Ryan Olshan comes to us from California where his main line of work was focused on the non-profit sector. From redesigning the web presence of Pacific Wildlife Project to creating an application for tracking wayward pigeons for the 911 Pigeon Alert group, Ryan has extended his love for animals to a technological aspect. In 2006, he was awarded the Microsoft MVP award in the area of ASP.NET for his ongoing commitment to the ASP.NET community. You can catch him online on many Yahoo! Groups and the ASP.NET Forums as well as StrongTypes.com and blogs.strongcoders.com.

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.

I will be presenting on Pair Programming at the Northern Virginia SQL Server User Group tonight.  I have done this presentation several times before but it is always fun to hear new perspectives – tonight should be interesting to hear DBA turned developer opinions (many people in this user group seem to fall into that category).

Our next release of Secret Server is out. This release includes lots of performance improvements and minor new features as per customer requests. We have also invested a lot of time in support for browser toolbars which we will be releasing soon. The browser toolbar will communicate with your Secret Server instance and automatically log you into web sites!

I tried something the weekend before last at the 3rd Mid-Atlantic Code Camp ... I went slideless!  I presented 3 sessions during the day and I did not have a single slide, not one, nada, nothing.  The good news was the audience loved it.  I took a few polls during the day and the response was definitely positive.

I will be presenting on Pair Programming (something we practice daily at Thycotic) tonight at the Washington DC Extreme Programming User Group.  The session involves an exercise (which I have blogged about before) but it is always interesting to hear peoples opinions and past experiences.  Pair Programming is definitely something that can have great effect in the right setting but requires disciplined practices and the right people to work effectively.