tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13198882404644570372011-07-07T17:07:05.200-07:00Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.comBlogger341100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-44881942322349942152010-02-12T12:20:00.000-08:002010-02-12T12:22:49.361-08:00

Recently, I attended a two day CSM (Certified Scrum Master) training class from a local company which both practices Scrum internally as well as serving as coaches and teachers to other companies wishing to move to Scrum. It was a good class, though I'd attended essentially the same class about two years ago when I first came to my current company.Let me start by saying I'm a fan of Scrum, I tend

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-81144221365388232322010-01-20T08:44:00.000-08:002010-01-20T08:45:03.126-08:00

Recently, my director published a new "capacity sheet". It's an Excel sheet with a high-level summary of all the projects scheduled for the upcoming year, with breakdowns in hours. The hours themselves are based on some simple formulae. A salesperson assigns the project a t-shirt size (S, M, L, or XL) and this translates to a predefined number of hours.The intention of the sheet is not to plan

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-76078838906080285982010-01-15T09:10:00.000-08:002010-01-15T09:17:46.832-08:00

Recently my company started a migration project to move all of our internals tools over to Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS). If you're not familiar with TFS, Microsoft bills it as an Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) suite which handles everything from source code control, to bug tracking, to project planning.Currently, tools and processes vary across teams. My company has been the

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-36059315247149090522010-01-04T08:24:00.000-08:002010-01-04T08:36:06.410-08:00

I've now been working on my little project tracking application, ZPlanner, for nearly a year now. It's certainly not been a full time effort, rather I work on it here and there when time allows and when my attention doesn't drift elsewhere (to blogging, the book I've been working on, and other random stuff), but I've made reasonable progress on it. It's actually getting reasonably close to being

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-64213976404000572452009-12-10T11:53:00.000-08:002009-12-10T12:09:54.345-08:00

A few weeks ago, I devoted a blog to talking about Mercurial, the distributed revision control system I decided to use for ZPlanner, my Agile project tracking tool. This week, I figured I'd briefly talk about one of the other choices I made, namely to use Maven2.For most of the career as a hand-on developer, I was trapped in the world of Perl and Apache. Our proprietary system didn't require

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-51255709653535274902009-12-03T12:24:00.000-08:002009-12-03T12:32:23.696-08:00

I joined my current company about 2.5 years ago. And since then the one constant has been my frustration with how inefficient the company is at times. These have included things such as an overreliance on obscenely expensive contractors (The first team of five developers I managed, cost somewhere around one million a year and contained no full-time employees), to endless meetings in which nothing

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-14870507721468760602009-11-17T08:49:00.001-08:002009-11-17T08:50:51.766-08:00

A couple weeks ago I wrote a bit about ReviewBoard, an open-source web application for doing code reviews. I now have it up and running and have introduced it to my team. Hopefully, over the next weeks and months we'll find it a useful tool for reviewing code.But it certainly took more than a little work to get it up and running on Windows. I had to install Apache, MySQL, PHP, Django, and any

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-3502344531813960362009-11-12T08:22:00.000-08:002009-11-12T08:24:21.936-08:00

I take a pretty dim view of 'management'. Hell, I wrote a whole blog about the existential angst I feel being a manager myself. If you're a developer, your contributions are concrete. You're writing the code and in the end the code is all that matters. In a very real sense, everything else, management, qa, client management, etc is ancillary to what you do.Once you step into a managerial role

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-84802592286749873272009-11-10T08:15:00.000-08:002009-11-10T08:51:40.360-08:00

If you've been following this blog for any period of time at all, you're probably aware of my little personal project called ZPlanner, an Agile project tracking tool. I've listed some of the technologies I chose for the project in past entries, and figured it might be interesting to devote a blog entry to one of them now and again.Today, I'll give a very brief view of the revision control system

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-53690573179912585482009-11-03T08:21:00.000-08:002009-11-03T13:39:53.706-08:00

It's fairly universally accepted that all code should undergo some type of review. The problem is, while it's easy in theory, in practice it tends to be kinda tough. I've had various experiences participating in code reviews ranging from realtively decent to horribly painful and I still don't know that I have a perfect answer as to "right way to do things" (tm).If I grab my "Software Engineering"

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-32776708068082734272009-10-29T09:47:00.000-07:002009-10-29T10:10:02.644-07:00

I stumbled on the following blogpost originally made in 2004 (updated in 2006) by Steve Yegge:http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/tour-de-babelI vaguely recall the name and from the page that linked to his post, he apparently worked at Amazon for a time before moving on to Google. That said, I highly suggest taking a look at the original blog post as it's a pretty fascinating (and opinionated)

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-77809028390831810442009-10-21T18:26:00.000-07:002009-10-22T09:18:33.277-07:00

Back when I was at my former company, it was always a sore point with me that "continued education" seemed to be a foreign word. Even as I climbed the ranks of the company I felt like I was losing all the hard-won skills and knowledge that I'd accumulated over my years in misery at university. Sure, I knew our codebase, but I didn't feel like I knew very much else. With my skills becoming

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-65112425602994702642009-10-15T08:44:00.000-07:002009-10-15T08:51:02.205-07:00

In my entry last week, I wrote about my experiences using TDD for the little personal project I've been working on called ZPlanner. At that point I was just beginning to refactor. I think that's one of the biggest things forgotten when people try to do some variant of TDD, or any programming really. The thought of starting to code without having spent hours and hours designing your solution to

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-90551053890434943172009-10-13T12:54:00.001-07:002009-10-13T12:59:47.884-07:00

Recently, I've been asked by my Director to help interview a number of Program Manager candidates. In the last two days, I've interviewed four different people. There was another flurry of candidates a few months ago in which I also participated, but we didn't end up hiring any of them.Now I have a tremendous amount of experience in hiring developers. I've been responsible for staffing large

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-16633887276558252542009-10-06T08:35:00.000-07:002009-10-06T08:42:28.344-07:00

As I've written once or twice before, I've been working on a lightweight Scrum/Agile piece of project management software. It's called ZPlanner and I've probably put all of 200-300 hours into it, though it's hard for me to say precisely. I started writing it when I thought I was going to be laid off from my job as development manager and wanted to brush up a bit on my Java programming skills. I

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-79759684852994779422009-10-02T08:39:00.000-07:002009-10-02T17:07:04.728-07:00

This is the fourth and final installment I'm going to write about offshoring. I've already written about the two implementations of offshoring I've been part of, what I thought worked, and what didn't.Let me recap the different approachs and my thoughts about what worked and what didn't.The first approach:Use Scrum with teams spanning geographical boundaries. Each onshore team was augmented with

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-2533912828316915112009-09-28T18:59:00.000-07:002009-09-28T19:43:26.083-07:00

Usually, I try to use this space to talk about deep, meaningful subjects (or something). But every once in awhile I think there's room for a little levity. I happened to be digging around some files and happened upon a real gem I figured I should share. I almost submitted it to thedailywtf.com, but decided:"Why the hell should I give them *my* content for free?"Anyway, a few years back I was

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-72010524376771327512009-09-23T12:13:00.000-07:002009-09-23T12:24:18.303-07:00

Last time I wrote about my experience with offshoring on a large migration project. Interestingly, as soon as we moved our code into production I was moved over to manage a completely different group. As a result of a company reorg my job had been promised to someone else. For awhile, it looked like I was going to be laid off, but after checking around a bit I was able to snag a development

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-84447281186935511942009-09-18T08:40:00.001-07:002009-09-18T09:09:17.659-07:00

I know I'd promised to finish up my mini-series on offshoring, but I like to be 'agile' with this blog. If a subject comes up in my day-to-day life that seems worthy of blogging I'd rather cover that and return to the more calculated subjects later. In any event, I've had a blog on my backlog about bureaucracy for some time now. Now, that entry is still yet to come, but today I will a share a

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-47667067378201244872009-09-15T19:37:00.000-07:002009-09-16T08:51:24.237-07:00

My first experience with offshoring, about which I wrote a bit last time, was fairly typical I suspect: have the expensive architect-level folks come up with a high-level design, then throw it over the fence to cheap code monkeys to implement. This is the dream of the bean counters and like many of the most flawed ideas in software engineering, the concept attempts to draw (unsuccessfully) from

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-14924119216039049602009-09-10T08:22:00.001-07:002009-09-10T09:10:12.836-07:00

My first experience with offshoring came about 4 or 5 years ago. My company at the time had hired developers in Romania to rewrite our in-house log grinding software. I hadn't really been involved in any of it, but I was forwarded an email from our Director of Technology. The gist of the email was that the code made him weep. It had enough gems to keep http://www.thedailywtf.com/ going for a

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-57053913168832945972009-09-02T12:08:00.000-07:002009-09-03T09:19:20.343-07:00

*pause**deep breath*My name is Zac and I'm a manager.Sigh.Way back when--about two years ago--being a dev manager seemed like a ticket to easy street. To be honest, I don't know that I was completely wrong.Back then I thought anyone with 'manager' in his title was either ineffectual, dead weight or, worse, someone who got in the way of really getting the work done by bothering me for constant (

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-8289965232822381502009-09-01T11:04:00.000-07:002009-09-01T11:49:23.853-07:00

I don't buy new computers very often. Once about every 2-3 years seems to be my current pattern and since just about two years have passed, I suppose I was due. So, I bought a new laptop.Now mind you, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with my current laptop. It's just BIG. I'd noticed a few co-workers carrying around spiffy little netbooks and now that I walk to and from work each day, my 7lb

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-73775517862097383222009-08-25T08:22:00.000-07:002009-08-26T11:54:10.857-07:00

If you've ever watched interviews with actors, it's almost invariable that at some point they'll utter the phrase "While I really enjoy acting, what I really want to do is direct." It's almost comical in it's predictability.The thing is, programmers aren't much different. At least that was the case at my former job, where rampant title inflation meant that the title of 'Director' was roughly

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-89014971512146810752009-08-20T08:25:00.000-07:002009-09-01T11:51:14.497-07:00

If you've read the excerpt from the book I'm working on, you'll know the last place I worked was at times a really miserable place to be. And the low point was when the person I have come to refer to as 'John' started to slowly take over our tight-knit team of developers. In a response to criticism over that initial excerpt, I also wrote about John's interesting use of the term 'Devil's advocate'

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-33321120076110171802009-08-15T17:29:00.000-07:002009-08-20T09:29:53.606-07:00

I got a few positive comments on the last post which contained an excerpt of the book I'm trying to write (when I don't get distracted writing stuff for this blog).I also, however, got an email from someone essentially saying that he felt the post was so full of anger that it had him looking critically at me. I'm guessing he was trying to evaluate if I was so blinded by my anger that I was no

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-91915027350359715002009-08-14T21:29:00.001-07:002009-08-18T19:53:54.415-07:00

I've been using variants of Scrum for a number of years now. Now, the topic of what does or doesn't qualify as Scrum is worthy of a blog itself (and it'll get one, trust me), but this blog is about something else, namely toolsets.I've tried the notecard things a few times, but I always end up coming back to software solutions to manage stories and tasks. And in most cases the companies I've

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-82551264708632294472009-08-14T16:18:00.001-07:002009-09-02T22:13:37.296-07:00

As a few of you know, I've been working on a book about my experiences at my last place of employment.I joined when the company consisted of only 30 or so people and over the course of four years or so, watched as it grew in size to almost 300 employees. I hadn't even realized how unique an experience it was, until a contractor who'd come in to do some work suggested I should capture some of what

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-27371651035004754732009-08-13T08:36:00.000-07:002009-08-18T19:54:38.010-07:00

So, after my last entry detailing what this blog would cover, specifically failure, I was asked if I'd actually post something substantive. Well, this may be a loose interpretation of that request, but this is blog about failure. Specially, meeting failure.At my current company, they like meetings. It varies by group/division, of course. Some really aren't that bad, others are horrendous. On the

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-25066670961442325802009-08-10T13:12:00.000-07:002009-08-18T19:57:08.523-07:00

I started this blog about two years ago with a brief mission statement. I then wrote a single entry and didn't make another entry for two years. So, it's worthwhile to again touch on what this blog is about and how I *hope* it differs from a lot of other blogs in the blogosphere.Excuse me for a sec, I need to go wash my mouth out. Using the word 'blogosphere' just made me throw up in my mouth a

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-45381717048805290992009-08-07T13:20:00.000-07:002009-08-18T19:55:18.391-07:00

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t really do much coding at work. Most of my time these days is spent greasing the wheels of a soul-crushing bureaucracy with my blood.Well, that and attending meetings.They are of a piece.But occasionally I do still delve into slightly more technical stuff. Mostly it’s on my own time, but recently I’ve actually been learning a little (gasp!) while at work. I

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-80128396504832541812009-08-06T01:44:00.000-07:002009-08-18T19:56:14.185-07:00

So, it's been awhile. Two years almost. When I wrote my last entry, I was just starting a new job as a development manager, and writing the coda for my former job.Since then I've learned an awful lot, made a ton of mistakes, changed positions within my company several times, and I'm finally ready to write another entry. You'd be forgiven if you thought it was some monumental thing that had

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-42175479461418004902007-11-14T18:02:00.000-08:002009-08-13T17:35:40.286-07:00

So, this past week I received a certified letter from the company I left only three months ago. The gist of it being that the company is buying back my exercised stock options. I can’t say I’m surprised.I started there about four years ago. Prior to that I’d had a job at a small company which does software for tier three autopart suppliers. That was more of an internship, though. I initially

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1319888240464457037.post-20446489040277707722007-11-14T17:24:00.000-08:002007-11-14T18:02:34.682-08:00

Well, this is it. I've talked about starting a blog for quite some time now, but I've just never gotten around to it. It’s been too much work or drama in my personal life or just sheer laziness, but there’s always been something keeping me from starting one of these things up. But today, I’m giving it a shot.I’m not sure how this will exactly work or what I’ll write; I know only one thing, it

Code Monkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09867589087975248055noreply@blogger.com1