Jonathan Cogley's Blog

John Morales has a great post on understanding complexity and how to think about difficult concepts.   

A very intelligent person once said:
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants."
The person in question, is of course none other than Sir Isaac Newton.  He was able to go further with his discoveries because others had solved some of the details already and provided a layer of abstraction for him to improve upon.

This is my second post with Live Writer and so far it seems pretty good.  We have been using BlogJet for a while and really like the intuitive interface although it seems like Live Writer has most of the same features. Being able to easily pull up an earlier blog post to make a correction is such a great feature for me since I always spot typos or missing links after the post goes out. I was also very impressed with the easy configuration of Live Writer - I simply pointed it to my blog url, gave my username/password, it prompted me for a blog engine type and then suggested a post URL and it all just worked!

I presented on Pair Programming at the Maryland ColdFusion User's Group on Tuesday and was very pleased to tell everyone about all the upcoming Code Camps in our area.  I also promised to post the links to the group, so here they are:

Do you breathe agile?  Do your progress bars always turn green?  Do you refactor in your sleep?  Then I need you for the agile track …  We are looking for attendees, speakers and volunteers!  This is the first Mid-Atlantic Code Camp to have an official Agile track (and I am the track chair – woohoo!)

I have been asked a number of times in the last few years if I think TDD (Test Driven Development) will go mainstream. Firstly, we need to agree on what mainstream is – Wikipedia does not give any hard numbers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainstream) but it seems like 20% would be a good number for software development (I pulled this out of thin area – please share your thoughts).  For TDD to have that much mindshare (in the stubborn software development world) would firmly seat TDD as an established and accepted way of developing code.  So how much mindshare does it have now?  Again I don’t know how you would get a measure (Gartner studies maybe?) but my experiences with software development in the Washington DC Metro area makes me think it is far less than 20%.

I will be presenting on Test Driven Development at the CMAP Architect Group in Maryland.  Session details and directions here.

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