Trumpi's blog

James Shore: Successful Software

Sometimes you find yourself in a job where the methodology and the project do not suit each other (*cough* waterfall). James Shore documents his experiences of introducing agile practices to an organisation that was patently waterfall:

I took a contract job as a programmer on a team customizing some web software for a large institutional customer. This team was the opposite of agile. I was bored and frustrated. It didn't take me long to remember Martin Fowler's advice. As a peon, could I make the kinds of changes I made as a (damned good!) XP coach? Or would they kick me out, causing me to change organizations a little more abruptly?

Source: James Shore: Successful Software

The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

It has happened many times: I open a console window, type chcp 850, and all who did behold it were amazed. There seems to be little knowledge among many developers about codepages, file encodings and matters relating to globalization. Joel has written a long article on his blog addressing this ignorance. He says:

I've been dismayed to discover just how many software developers aren't really completely up to speed on the mysterious world of character sets, encodings, Unicode, all that stuff.

Source: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) - Joel on Software

Some good testing ideas

Six commonly believed things that are wrong

Stuart Coleman has written a very interesting post about 6 Commonly Believed Things That Are Wrong. I found it interesting that medieval people did not think that the world was flat.

Edit: Just to note that whatever I find interesting and whatever I believe are not the smae tihngs. I'm still taking the whole "medieval people did not think the world was flat" thing with a pinch of salt.

Team Foundation Server && Continuous Integration == false

Roy Osherove has recently written a blog entry where he outlines his frustration at getting continuous integration to work with Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Read what he has to say here