July 9, 2010

Lean Software and Systems Conference 2010 (Bletchley Park)

This is just a summary of the points I took from the Lean conference at Bletchley. They all need expanding, this is just the stuff that struck me that I want to record.

May 15, 2009

Comments on representations of our industry

I have not (yet) seen the presentation this post is referring to. But I think many of the comments Ted makes are very valid, and our industry as a whole should occasionally stop and think. I’ve seen Ted speak at QCon, and I’ve had a lot of time for his comments ever since. I’m aware that this blog is rapidly filling with comments about gender and perceptions and people-y stuff, when I originally wanted it to be a purely technical blog.

April 2, 2009

Why changing jobs frequently is not necessarily a bad thing...

…in fact, it’s actually a good thing.

March 30, 2009

Sexism in IT?

Let’s celebrate our IT women “Everyone” knows that there are more men than women in IT. That it’s a “boys” job. Not a lot of people know that the first programmer was a woman. Not a lot of people realise the number of women in IT is DECREASING. And has been since the 80s. In a working world where I honestly believe that in general there are more opportunities for women (OK, inline with the other stuff I’ve been reading I’ll caveat this with white, middle-class women), it seems shocking that such a growth industry as IT is actually losing women, and appears unable to determine why, or stop the flow.

February 24, 2009

Scrum but...

Having experienced Flaccid Scrum, I find this article interesting, and agree with most of it. I’d also like to add though, that if you do the scrum practices (story cards, stand ups, retrospectives, etc) but don’t buy into the fundamental principals, you will not succeed. And that means everyone on the team, not just the people in charge. In particular, if the team is not empowered, is not committing to the estimates and the iteration plan in its heart, and and does not trust, then you are probably better off using traditional processes.

December 18, 2008

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

December 16, 2008

Gender Stereotyping

I’m very interested in the subject of gender stereotyping, which probably isn’t surprising as I’m a girl in a predominantly male industry. And I like cars, and sports, and get irritated if people assume I’m not “allowed” to be interested in these things.

Far from being discriminated against, however, I find many people ask me why there aren’t more women in the industry and what can be done to encourage girls into IT. If these questions were easy to answer, they wouldn’t have to be asked.

December 11, 2008

Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money

Nine Things Developer Want More Than Money Read if you’re a developer and wondering what’s missing from your job. Read if you’re a manager and you’re looking to recruit the right types of developers. In particular be honest with yourself over whether your organisation is more aligned to “hygiene” or “motivation”. At least one of the poor job decisions I have made is because the role was mis-sold as one and turned out to be the other.

November 20, 2008

Working Environment

How important to you is your working environment?

Type of desk
What’s on it
Position / type of mouse, keyboard, monitor(s)
Music / background sound (or lack of it)
Open plan vs team room vs cube vs personal office
etc…

These physical items could be extended to include your virtual environment:

October 8, 2008

Amazing!

Today, I found my own blog useful. I was configuring Spring validation on my new project, and had to remind myself how to do it. We configured validation on the new project in less than an hour, which beats the two days it took me to work out how to do it the first time. And I impressed one of my new work collegues. Apparently I am now the Spring Guru.

October 6, 2008

Multiple Environment Configuration in Maven

Today, I found this blog post very useful.

September 1, 2008

On the perils of Front End Design

I’m reading Joel Spolsky’s User Interface Design for Programmers. A thought that’s struck me is about architecture. It’s easy to get fooled into thinking building software is a bit like being the architect for a building. I’m not even going to go into the differences between engineering practices à la building design and good practice software design. I’m going to start from the easy point, the stuff you can see.

July 30, 2008

Job Hunting

I’ve learnt a lot professionally and personally during my time here in New York, but the time has come to go back “home”.I’ll be relocating to London in September. I guess it won’t hurt to mention on here that I’ll be looking for an exciting new job when I get back there. Check out my LinkedIn profile if you are in the market for a Java tech team lead.

May 21, 2008

Scrum

I think the statement that struck me the most when I was on the Certified Scrum Master course was:

The start of the project is when you know the least about what you’re doing

Which of course is absolutely true.

So why do we come up with extensive requirements, detailed design, and fixed plans at this point of time? We haven’t put anything into place yet, we haven’t played with the code, the customer hasn’t seen anything of what we’re promising to deliver.

May 20, 2008

BSc (Hons) SCJP SCWCD CSM

What are our thoughts on putting all the letters after your name in a CV/resume? Pretentious? Or the only reasonable time to use all those letters?

April 29, 2008

Tales from the Other Side: Confessions of an Offshore Resource

After the acquisition of a company with offices in New York, I pestered my company outrageously until they got fed up and finally relented – they agreed to send me to the US.

To ease the transition, I chose to move onto a project which would allow me to start working in London and continue on the same team after I had moved to New York.

In the extreme over-excitement that followed my relocation, it took me a little while to realise that effectively I was an offshore resource, no different really from any of our Indian test team, and the team needed to manage this appropriately.

I learnt a number of lessons whilst playing this game. Some of these points are also valid for teams with remote resources (e.g. people working from home).

April 17, 2008

Metrics and Incentives.

This is a great example of what happens when you try to incentivise intelligent people on very simple metrics. They cheat. This was well described in Freakonomics, and something Mr On Software bangs on about regularly. It’s clear that there isn’t really a good answer to the problem - actually that’s not true. The answer to the problem is to have everyone working in a job they are happy in and proud of, one where they are intrinsically motivated, and give them enough information to allow them to make the correct calls when it comes to prioritising work.

April 16, 2008

Certification

I know there are arguments against certification, and I definitely think that using certifiction to determine whether to interview or recruit people is downright daft, because frankly learning a bunch of answers isn’t all that difficult. But I personally find that completing a certification really helps to round out my knowledge in an area. I guess my thoughts are that a fairly recent certification combined with the work experience to back it up is something that would make your CV more interesting to recruiters.

April 14, 2008

AOP Caching

Today I would like to document my experiences implementing caching with Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) and annotations.

April 10, 2008

Certified Scrum Master

Hmm. I have been so busy trying to think of “good” things to write here, and not having the time to actually write, that I see it’s been 6 months since the last post. If anyone is still out there though, I need help. I need a good Certified Scrum Master course in New York or London, preferably in April or May. Any suggestions? The one I wanted to go on was vetoed and now I find it’s not running in NY again until Autumn.

October 10, 2007

The importance of choosing a good scale for your metrics

July 16, 2007

Validation with Spring Modules Validation

So if java generics slightly disappointed me lately, what have I found cool? I’m currently working on a web application using Spring MVC, which probably doesn’t come as a big surprise, it seems to be all the rage these days. Since this is my baby, I got to call the shots as to a lot of the framework choices. When it came to looking at implementing validation, I refused to believe I’d have to go through the primitive process of looking at all the values on the request and deciding if they pass muster, with some huge if statement.

July 7, 2007

Java Specifics

When I first started playing with Java 1.5, I thought generics were the best thing since sliced bread. No more untidy casting, lovely type-safe Collections, and when combined with the new for loop, a lot of the tedious tasks associated with Collections became easier and, most importantly, aesthetically pleasing.

April 23, 2007

Excuses excuses.

Isn’t a shame that actual day-to-day work always seems to get in the way of progress? How you’re always too busy fire-fighting to actually perform the critical thing that might actually improve affairs. All this is basically a setup for a roundabout excuse for why this blog has been neglected so shortly after it was begun. I was a bit too busy doing the day job. Still, people like Joel and Scott manage regular pronouncements and I’m sure they’re much busier than I!

March 23, 2007

Agile Infection Growing

This is a bloody good idea. It builds upon my own Virgoen tendancies to write lists and tick things off, but what the list model lacks is the “in progress” state. Plus occasionally my lists get confused. See today’s notebook page:

March 22, 2007

QCon: Blogger's Summary

I might be too late in writing my own thoughts on QCon, but a bunch of other people have done a pretty good job.

March 21, 2007

Certifiction

From spellfecker today: Certifiction (n.) : a professional endorsement which states only that the holder had the money to pay for the exam. …which reminded me of this debate, particularly the first comment.

March 20, 2007

Continuing the Agile froth...

…there are a number of points in this interview with Paul Oldfield which are interesting to consider when thinking about “doing Agile right”. It seems to be compatible with my “people over process” view - I’m not stating that having good people negates the need for any form of process or discipline, I have seen that this is simply not the case. I do however think that agile techniques in particular rely heavily upon the “right” people / team, for some nebulous definition of “right”.

March 20, 2007

QCon: TODO list inspired by the conference

(Updated 15 Dec 2020 with correct completed status!) Investigate Maven 2 for builds Have a glance at TestNG unit testing (completed 2013) Potentially play with JMock for current testing framework (completed ~2009) Play with GWT. (completed 2009-2013) Sign up for Pragmatic Architect event Check out JavaBlackBelt site - what is provided, and what are the feelings of professionals (or, more importantly, recruiters) towards these qualifications? Look into getting Visual Studio .

March 19, 2007

QCon: Initial thoughts

Things I took out of QCon: I want to play with Ajax. Maybe I’ve “grown out” of front end development but that doesn’t prevent it from being (potentially) extremely cool Selenium looks like a good place to start for automated website testing It can take up to 7 years to move away from a legacy architecture. Depressing, but at least it shows it can be done and it’s worth the effort I’m going to become a certified Scrum Master Mistress.