I Really Don’t Know

Learn Programming in 21 Days

I found this linked from Simple Geek (Chris Anderson’s Blog)

http://www.norvig.com/21-days.html

I hadn’t read it before, but it backs up, I think, even further the notion that you have to recruit Grey Matter rather than Grey Hair.

Jet Brains ReSharper

Another C# refactoring tool crossed my browser windows today…

JetBrains ReSharper The Jetbrains C# plugin for Visual Studio EAP program is open: http://www.jetbrains.net/resharper The username and password are both ‘eapuser’.

I haven’t tried it yet.

ATDD XPDay 2003

Owen Rogers (Thoughtworks) presenting our ATDD Test Framework thoughts at XPDay 2003
Courtesy of Tom Poppendieck, Tom’s other photos of the day. Fortunately, I didn’t make it into frame - I’m off to the left.

Dave Fellows showing how he hugs all the members of his development team at once. ;-)

Here are the slides

Bids & Staffing

I’ve had two calls recently from people looking to bring in resource for MS CMS that seem to tie up. One was from an organisation who needed to line up resource in order to show they could do the work. The second, a few days later, came from another organisation who had just won the bid and needed to find resource quickly - before it became obvious to the client they had none.

This is a really extreme case of JIT resourcing, and strikes me as very high risk. It also suggests that extending the idea of Grey Matter versus Grey Hair to your bid selection process makes sense.

Building a simple CMS XML Placeholder

I’ve just been down to see some guys in the middle of nowhere… Beautiful little office on a deer park, with views over fields and so incredibly quiet. A company called Torchbox who are getting up-to-speed with MS CMS.

While I was there the big question was why one of their placeholders wasn’t working, which I think we figured, but I also put together a very basic XML Placeholder control to act as a base for them. I thought it would be worth dropping it up here for the record.

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Redmond, oh Redmond

Well, I’ve just got back from a week in Redmond. It rained.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, being interviewed by some of the world’s finest techies at Microsoft’s main campus in Redmond.

I got grilled by nine people, each individually, over two days. Each interview lasting for between an hour and two and a half. Questions ranging from ‘Design a switch for a car sunroof’ to ‘Redesign this very obscure piece of Outlook’.

None of the expected ‘you have two buckets, measure a quart’ type questions, apart from one:

And no, it’s not 3 o’clock.