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No, I’m not going to complain that I’ve been too busy to update my blog. Anyway, it seems I post once a month. But I’m going to complain that I’m lacking time to read everything I would like to. For example, I haven’t read the eXtreme Programming mailing list on yahoo groups for more than two months. Some nights, if I find a couple of interesting articles on my regular round of websites, plus the blogs I watch, a couple of hours pass without notice. Add to that the pile of books sitting on my desk (without counting all the classic sci-fi I would like to read) and… well you get the picture. What’s worse is that I’m in a kind of flux (not sure if it’s the right word here) with books related to software engineering. I feel like I’ve read enough about Agile and XP for a while. I’m looking to expand into other subjects. Last night I started The Secrets Of Consulting by Jerry Weinberg and have to say I quite enjoyed the first chapter. I think I’ll have to buy a copy for a friend who just started some consulting work. I’ll post more about it in the coming weeks.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Once again, I start a blog and leave it to rot for a few weeks. Actually, I started a new post two weeks ago about Lean Software Developement by Mary and Tom Poppendiek, telling how great of a book it is. However I did not like the few sentences I had written. It did not do the book justice. I tried again a few days later and still couldn’t finish it. I could not find the words again.
Meanwhile, I read on another blog, I don’t remember which one, about getting into some kind of rythm when it comes to writing, how the author finds it tougher if he has not done it for a while. Which reminded me why I kinda started a blog in the first place: not because I think my daily activities or opinion on world events might interest somebody, but because I want to improve my communications skills, better explain my ideas.
Some of my posts won’t make sense some of the time, but I guess it will get better over time.
Popularity: 3% [?]
I inherited some of the worst code I have ever seen. Part of the problem, according to the original coder, is ASP.Net strange ways of doing things. The real problem is that he didn’t really try to understand how the framework actually works. This led to him creating a method called EnsureStart() that is the first thing called inside every method for example.
Anyway, in two weeks, I refactored most of his code to make it understandable, have the intialization happen only in one place. I think the biggest problem with ASP.Net right now is the magic is does automatically when you create your controls in the web form with the Visual Studio designer. Once you start to add dynamic controls, things start to get messy, as the magic is not done for you, and you have to make sure you recreate them every time. Also, on your page_load event, your dynamic controls might not all be loaded. This generally means that you do not have access to the new values entered by the user yet.
After two weeks, I cannot say that I’m impressed, but it is definitely less bad than what most people told me.
Popularity: 4% [?]
The social sciences are also fairly bogus, because they’re so much influenced by intellectual fashions. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago, he could teach him some new things; if a psychologist met a colleague from 100 years ago, they’d just get into an ideological argument.
That was too funny to pass on. I normally don’t really like what Paul Graham has to say, but this time he nailed something that I never could quite articulate by myself about social science.
Popularity: 4% [?]
the forest wallaby Dorcopsis muelleri (or Djief in Meybrat language)
I have been using djief as a nickname for about 8 years now thinking it meant nothing. Guess I was wrong. Djief is apparently a wallaby, a marsupial from the western half of New Guinea.
Popularity: 3% [?]
