sfeldman.NET

[Purely Personal]

“Never give up, never surrender” was my favourite part from the Space Odyssey. Today it proved to be true again. How do you lift the skills of the team? By lifting the overall skills, by raising the bar for the whole team. This was the GCD is lifted, forcing the less strong developers to invest more, rather than doing an opposite, forcing the strong developers to play dummy.

Why do I writing this at all? Because I appreciate when people are brave enough to call white a white and black a black, and not just call it a shade of grey. Today I managed to bring back the skills lifting back to the team. This is a great opportunity to prove that by sharing the knowledge more can be achieved. Admitting mistakes made to fix those is the right step in a better direction.

Today I had a friend of mine, Mr. Mo, visiting us for a dinner and then having a little code jam (with a cup of tea and some crackers). A few things I would like to comment on:

- Thank you Mo for discovering the great taste of Oren’s triple A stake. Rhino Mocks 3.5 is awesome. Not only it is more natural to read, but also blends the differences between state based and interaction based testing into more cohesive testing. I loved it.

- I am not the only one who has strong negative feelings about not-so-sexy stored procedures and logic in DB

- TDD PPP (ping pong pairing) with a developer that has same attitude as you are is amazing. Ready to push the boundaries, ready to be bold with code. Willing to experiment to have it done better.

- People over processes is so much valid. I have burned so many bridges in the past. No longer willing to do it. Serving as a good example is way better than a target for hatred.

- Fear and Pride are the worse enemies of almost any developer. Fear of an unknown. Pride of the old achievements. When you free of thus bargain, you are able to achieve more. Much more.

PS: Mo, relocate to SW!

Update: Mark Capaldi has revealed a great VS.NET shortcut that does the work (Shift-ESC).

Albert Weinert has release an update to his plugin to allow execution of R# 4.0 from within Visual Studio .NET 2005 / 2008. The only Unit Testing framework supported by R# 4.0 out of box is NUnit, so this is a useful plugin for those who prefer MbUnit to NUnit.

It's Canada Day today. And it's opening of The ALT.NET Open Spaces conference in Calgary, taking place August 15-17, 2008 (at the University of Calgary).

The leading bargeman

A few months ago I blogged about Domain Objects vs. Primitive Types. Back then it felt right to me to transform a primitive type, like a Guid that represented an organization ID, to an Organization domain object. Unfortunately at that time I was not educated enough to know that this is a common idiom among many object designers. Apparently it is. Craig Larman writes it nicely in his book (in my case Organization is what Craig references to as a Customer):

It is very hard to provide an honest opinion when you are involved in a situation. I found it always difficult for myself and admired people of being able to do it, lifting themselves from emotional attachments to the matter.