Raymond Lewallen

There is too much money to be made in software development

Raymond Lewallen — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 01:59:00 GMT

Its true. Too much money is available to IT.

As a business with too much money assigned to an IT budget, you’re allowed to have teams completely fail, miserably, and when they do, you just throw more money at it. Lack of money isn’t the problem. The failures will still exist.

Mediocre developers can make too much money. Enough money so that there is no incentive for them to be better at their jobs. To improve. They are satisfied with the amount of salary they receive, and do not feel compelled to improve as the amount of money they would receive in addition isn’t enough to justify the amount of effort required to exist in a zone of software excellence.

The market is saturated with mediocrity, and at a high price. I’m not going to start repeating myself here; those several sentences above pretty much say it all. Too many developers don’t have incentive to improve their processes and abilities because they are overly compensated for their skills. Do they deliver some sort of business value, eventually? Probably. And too many of them do it as consultants, write shitty software, deliver working software that nobody in the world can come in and understand what the hell is going on in the code. Business are blind to this aspect of the software development lifecycle: solubility (thanks Scott) and maintainability. Make it work, at any cost, and move on to another paycheck. This is the world we, as software developers, are living in.

What is the rememdy? How to we improve this? How do excellent software developers make businesses wake up and take notice to the wool over their eyes? Do I write awesome software? Certainly not. There are occasions where some of the decisions I make should be exposed for what they are: poor decisions. I do what I can to expose them and make them visible so that all involved can learn from my mistakes. Perhaps I don’t do enough of this, because, after all, my job and reputation is at stake. At the same time, I feel a moral responsibility to expose myself. I need to improve, but the software community as a whole needs to improve even more.

Are you a problem solver or a developer?

Raymond Lewallen — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 18:23:46 GMT

I had this conversation with some friends on Twitter about a month ago and have been thinkinng about it ever since. We are all professionals, but professional what?

I have come to the conclusion that I am a problem solver. That’s my business. Whether its process management, software architecture, personal growth for my development team or trying to keep my daughter from stealing my son’s toys, I solve problems. Software development is my tool (except for the stealing part. I use my daddy voice for that).

One thing I have learned from BDD is that developers spend too much time thinking about technical implementation details rather than the problem at hand itself. I am continuously working with my current team to get them all to adjust to this way of thinking: think about the problem. What are we trying to do? We’re not trying to write software, we are trying to provide value to our customer, and we achieve that through software. Adopting the context/specification style of testing has helped me evolve even more into a digging into a deeper understanding of what the problem really is, what context does the problem apply to, and what are the specifications that are proof to show that a solution can be demonstrated? You MUST think about these issues before writing any code, and too many developers just want to code without fully understanding what the problem is. ONLY when you fully understand the problem, can duplicate the problem and demostrate it with specifications, can you start thinking about technical implementation. Naturally, you have to have some sort of roadmap, an idea for system architecture, think about non-functional requirements, and that’s all expected and necessary. But when it comes down to coding a piece of behavior into a system, too many developers are still just jumping in and coding. Even when writing unit tests, developers are thinking about the techinical aspects of the system and often write poor unit tests. I’ve been there. This is why I feel TDD is an ancient and outdated craft. TDD does not do enough to force developers to really focus on the problem and gain a full understanding of it prior to coding. I feel BDD helps achieve this.

I haven’t posted anything on what I’m doing with BDD because you can search CodeBetter for it and find information from several of the bloggers, all of whom I’ve spent a considerable amount of time with to help me evolve to be a better problem solver, by way of writing software.

We need to focus on the problem at hand, and let the technical details and implementations evolve from specifications and that demonstrate the problem. C# is easy. Correctly solving the problem your customer is having and delivering the appropriate behavior is much more difficult, so there is where your time needs to be spent: understanding the problem. Once you fully understand what you are trying to deliver and have specifications within context to demonstrate this, the technical solution will be clear, simple and right in front of you. Let it evolve from that. The technical implementation is secondary to the understanding of the solution.

LOL You have got to see this

Raymond Lewallen — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 15:43:08 GMT

This was just WAY TOO FUNNY to pass up sharing with everybody! Sorry for the link post, but I couldn't stop myself. Check out the name of the ship!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7108835.stm

How do you clean up the files in a project quickly?

Raymond Lewallen — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 18:04:00 GMT

Put your hands on your keyboard, don’t touch the mouse.

CTRL-ALT-L; Down Arrow (to a file), Enter, CTRL-ALT-F, Enter, (F12, Alt-Enter, Enter (repeat all necessary loops)), CTRL-ALT-F, Enter, CTRL-S, CTRL-F4

Repeat until you reach the end of the file list. *note* you have to have Resharper. If you don’t, shame on you. Your job is harder than mine.

Update: This is using IntelliJ mappings. The key sequences are as follows:

CTLR-ALT-L – move from editor window to solution explorer.

CTRL-ALT-F – reformat code

F12 – move to next error/problem/issue

ALT-ENTER – suggestions for fixing issue

CTRL-S – save the file

CTRL-F4 – close the fil

As a scrummaster, scrum is not my first option to a new client

Raymond Lewallen — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:42:00 GMT

I had this discussion briefly at BarCamp Dallas yesterday. The question came up as to how do I describe scrum to my client?

When going into a new client, I don’t. There are a lot of companies out there that are reading about scrum and learning scrum on their own, and then want to hire somebody to come in and implement it. And if they bring you in, the thing you shouldn’t do is start implemeting scrum.

I would argue that most established development groups have a process model that they are following, and do it reasonably well. The real question you ask first is what is wrong with your current process? What is and is not working? Are you delivering stable software releases? On time? Within budjet? Desired functionallity for the stakeholders and users? I've gone into clients who want to implement scrum, yet are able to answer these questions with answers that are indicative that they are operating very well under their current process, but might just need a few tweaks, not an entire change to how the lifecycle in managed.

Very often, its just a matter of finding out what is wrong with the current processes, and find a way to fix them. Scrum can be a major disruption to the flow and efficiency to a partially successful development team. Implementing scrum into an existing team, which more times than not requires and entire mindshift and replacement of most of their current processes, is difficult for the team, for management, for stakeholders, etc.

Bottom line is don’t go into an existing team and just implement scrum because they think its going to solve their problems. Scrum is much more about making problems transparent so that you are forced to face them and solve them by other means. Scrum is not necessarily a solution to many of the problems you have. It certainly helps clarify what problems are lurking within your team that you just may not be able to recognize.

Scrum is my preferred process management solution. Its not right for all teams and not necessary for all teams. Help your client to clarify their problems and find ways to resolve them within their current processes before completely changing how the lifecycle is managed.

Alt.Net does NOT equal Anti-Microsoft

Raymond Lewallen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 01:08:00 GMT

I've had this post sitting in the queue forever. Not forever, but about 2 months. Before I start, I'd love to be able to go back and quote the mass amount of Alt.Net posts that have come out of CB over the last few days, but to be honest I don't have time to read them right now. I'm the busiest person I know and can't even find time to read.

This post originates from the Oklahoma City CodeCamp we held back in July, where we had a Microsoft technologies track, and an Alt.Net track. The Microsoft track consisted of things like Silverlight, WPF, WCF, C# 3.0 and the like. Alt.Net consisted of BDD, TDD, pair-programming, DDD with NHibernate. After the code camp was over, I had specific feed back come back to me that people stated that they loved the Microsoft and Anti-Microsoft tracks. WTF!?!

Disregard the fact everybody in the Alt.Net track used Visual Studio. They all ran on Windows. They all programmed in C#. How do concepts surrounding great principles and practices around software development get viewed as being anti-Microsoft? Seriously?

This concept completely confuses me. What mindset are the people in who make these statements? Now I'm not going to go recite what is Alt.Net. I think the community is flooded with this information right now and you probably know what those of us close to the idea are trying to convey. How can you look at what Alt.Net portrays and publicizes, and believe these are things that go against what Microsoft tries to do? Microsoft is in the business of making money. They give us tools, some good, some bad, to help us create software faster (ok, maybe a few pieces help us deliver better software). And we buy them. We may or may not use Microsoft tools, and certainly shouldn't limit ourselves to a single vendor, framework, concept or methodology. Alt.Net is about creating better software, and using the right tools and practices to help you accomplish this, be it Microsoft or not.

Alt.Net and Microsoft should go walking down the aisle together, get married, and produce offspring that carry the dominant genes of both pools. They compliment eachother. They should reside together in your head and in your toolset as you accomplish the task of creating better software. That goes for Alt.Net + any tool vendor + any methodology that you and your team understands, can grok, use and make your team the most productive team it can be and deliver business value. I believe most of the folks close to Alt.Net embrace Microsoft and what it tries to do, even if some of what it does is poorly thought out and even unusable to some people, IMO. Microsoft is getting better at listening and understanding the developer community. Many Microsoft folks are coming to the Alt.Net conference in Austin in 2 weeks and I think its going to be valuable for all involved.

Since I don't know who made the remarks specifically (they came back to me anonymously, and it was several remarks, not just one person), I can't go to them and start this discussion. I have to bring it up here and see what comes of it to help me and my understanding of how I can help convey the ideas behind Alt.Net better to my community without somehow having them perceived as anti-Microsoft.

Welcome Dave Laribee to CodeBetter!

Raymond Lewallen — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:09:00 GMT

So this is a no brainer. Where is there a better fit for Dave Laribee other than CodeBetter? So many of us share the same ideals, the same goals, suffer the same pains and have common solutions for problems we encounter, that it only made sense that Dave Laribee join us at CodeBetter, where a family exists that he can join and feed off of, and provide support to. Dave is a great asset to the software development community, and thus a wonderful addition to the CodeBetter community.

We welcome Dave Laribee, the man most popular for his 80s style hair and attire, flashing his legs while wearing his daisy dukes (I have to photos to prove this), but you may also remember him from a term he coined earlier this year: Alt.Net.

Welcome Dave! Its great to have you!

Reminder that the Oklahoma City Code Camp is this weekend!

Raymond Lewallen — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 22:17:40 GMT

For those of you in the area, just a reminder that the code camp is this weekend and we have a few of our very own CodeBetter guys (Jean-Paul Boodhoo and Scott Bellware), along with Dave Laribee, David Walker, Tim Rayburn, Cory Smith, Ben Shierman, David Nicollette and Eric Stott. Our keynote speaker is the general manager of the .Net Developer Division at Microsoft, Jason Zander!

View the agenda here, and be sure to register if you are coming!

www.okcodecamp.com

What I am doing to become a better developer

Raymond Lewallen — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 04:17:38 GMT

I'm happy to oblige Jeremy on answering his tag on this meme that was started recently.

For me, the first and best step to take in becoming a better developer is that daily realization of how much I don't know. When I read blogs or talk to other people or read a chapter in a book, its just overwhelming how much information goes along with this career path. Perhaps that is wehy recently I've been really stirring the pot in my head and really thinking about how much longer I'm really going to write code as my primary job function. I'm always going to write code (everything I hit the W key on my keyboard an E comes out with it and its really starting to piss me off) because I love the problem solving that goes with being a developer. I love refactoring code. I wish "refactorer" was my official job title and primary job function. I think its fun as hell and resharper helps to make it fun. However, I really want to move towards more of a coaching role, where I can sit and code with other team members, do that for a few months and then move to a new team. I think I'd really enjoy doing something like that. Now the question becomes am I good enough of a teacher to do that? My big problem is I'm not really a people person when it comes to work. I can be rude and condescending at times, and I am making an active effort to curb that type of behavior when I sense it happening. I'm not going to be a successful fulltime coach until I can handle some of my attitude issues. I also can be arrogant and display egotistical behavior, but I'm fine with that. I feel it almost necessary to be able to voice your opinions, be confident in yourself and your arguments, and fight your battles well. That comes off to many people as elitist, and so be it. At the same time, accept defeat graciously and be humble. There's always someone nearby that's going to know more than you do about a given subject matter.

Honestly, I really am very busy lately, when I'm not procrastinating (see below). I have a manical almost 4 year old who is just totally messed up in the head and is a freak of nature. I honestly don't understand how kids find the energy and complete random behaviors that they do. She's crazy. She really is. She gets it from her mother. I spend a lot of time with her because we have a 3 month old at home now too and my stay at home wife needs all the breaks she can get. I take my daughter out on the weekends and we fish or swim or *cough*dropheroffatgrandparentswhileIgotothecasino*cough* or just walk around the mall and have lunch. I enjoy spending time with my daughter, and that is, I'm sure you would all agree, more important that anything that I could do to evolve myself as a developer. I have to make sure I'm evolving as a father first, then take care of the secondary things. Raising my children is my real career. Getting to write software for money is just a perk, because its my hobby anyways.

So back to the original topic at hand, here's my list of things that I want to address over the near future to become a better developer:

Things I Should Do

Same as Jeremy, work on planning and estimation skills. I attended a 2 day Mike Cohn course, and it was awesome. He's a great teacher. I want to spend more time with guys like him who have an incredible amount of real world successes and failures to draw on when coaching. I need to pick up everything he's and a few others have written on agile planning and estimation.

I started my career in the database. I was a DBA for many years prior to really getting heavy into programming. Since Sql Server 2005 came out, I've really not done much database work and I'm missing it. I love design, modeling, tuning and other developer-based tasks. Its the actual admin crap that I really never liked. SqlSvr2005 has some really awesome features, and I was doing a lot with them back in 2005. I want to get back into databases again. Those of you who were reading this blog back in 2005 can probably recall that well over half of all my posts were database/T-SQL related.

I don't know Ruby. Never even looked at it. Boo as well. I keep reading so many awesome things, but I just... can't... squeeze...more time into my day. I need to learn both and what they can do for me.

AgileDevelopers.Org. I need to get something done with that. I started the Oklahoma Agile Developers group, which is headed by a committee comprised of .Net, Java and Ruby user group leaders and practitioners. My focus is a language agnostic workshop group. If anybody wants to help with the website and get something going with me on a worldwide scale through the website, or if you have other ideas, just let me know. I'm not sure what I want to do with the website yet, but the possibilities are awesome and no doubt some things can be done with it from a shear repository viewpoint that would certainly help me become a better developer if the information were available and easily accessible and organized. But, that's what google is for.

Quit procrastinating. I'm normally not bad about this, but I've been so incredibly busy this year that I've been finding myself just stopping and doing nonsense stuff more often that I should. Fishing every weekend does not count as nonsense stuff. That's what I do to maintain sanity. But when I pulled out the old super nintendo last week out of the attic to play Gauntlet Legends and Castlevania, well, I'm not getting many books read, posts finished (I have well over a dozen unfinished blog posts) or emails sent.

Things I Want to Do

Spec#. I've played with this in the past, and really liked what its does for DbC software development. I want (damn you W key!!) to get back to playing with it again and really get into it. Greg Young and I have occasional conversations about it and his enthusiam and knowledge about the language extension keeps my hyped up about it. Thanks Greg!

F#. Functional languages in general really. I've talked to several people who really dig F#, but on the same token they understand functional programming better than I do, so I have some work to do. With Spec# I understand it, grok it well, have written some apps utilizing it and knowe where I can go with it. F# not so much. I hear a lot of talk about possibilities with F#, but I just don't have the knowledge to think about what it can do for me, and I need to fill that gap.

Get back to blogging more frequently. Lately I can't even read all that I want to, much less find time to blog. When I was blogging more often, I was spending time researching issues, playing with other tools, learning new things about the CLR and just having fun investigation the CLR. If I could find time to blog more, I would be doing those things, which no doubt improves my abilities as a developer.

Not much else I really want to do. I'm really comfortable with what I have going on right now. I do need to get out of my C# hole though and get back to expanding my horizons and widening my visions of what is possible and easier to do with other languages and concepts. I spent most of last year working on concepts such as DDD and then BDD (both of which I am continuing to educate myself). This year I haven't done anything to expand myself in this developer career of mine. Oddly enough, I've been comfortable with that this year. Maybe 13 years into it, my conscience decided its time to take a year off from cramming languages, concepts, methodologies etc into my head.

Things I Won't Do

Stop my community involvment. If at all possible, as long as its not at an expense to my family, I will continue everything I do to help my community evolve to become better developers. I've done 9 speaking engagements this year to date, have 7 more scheduled, am planning a code camp (www.okcodecamp.com), and am on the steering committee or head of the developer or agile track for 3 other conferences this year. Its a lot of work, a shitton of emails but a lot of fun to see those things be successful. Oh yeah, I'm also the president the Oklahoma City Developers Group and founder/president of the Oklahoma Agile Developers group. I really enjoy helping the community, which has a lot to do with my thoughts on a slight career change to fulltime coaching/mentoring with some development, rather than full time developer with some coaching/mentoring. I feel my community involvement and relationships that are built help me be a better developer because of the knowledge and perspectives I gain via conversations.

Although at one time I wanted to get into them, WPF, WCF and WWF are not in my plans for the future. Not to say I won't learn any or all of them eventually (I own several books on each subject, not opened a single one of them) but for now its hard enough just staying up with domain knowledge. I'm consulting to oil and gas industry and its a big change for me. I spent 4 years in aviation and felt extremely comfortable with my domain knowledge and ability to find answers. I'm in a completely new to me industry now and I spend my time learning about it, not new technologies that I obviously don't need to solve my design issues. Maybe they are better solutions in a few cases, but the tradeoff against the learning curve involved just isn't there.

Tagging these folks

K. Scott Allen (its a given that I always tag K. Scott when these things come around, I'm sure he appreciates it more than I know), Daniel Moth, Phil Haack, Oren Ellenbogen

Calling Bologna!

Raymond Lewallen — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 02:55:00 GMT

The title may sound obscure, but its actually something our scrum team recently implemented. Using a keyword to designate that the scrum was turning towards status-meeting or small meetings are taking place. This team is new and has limited or no experience working together, and most of them have not worked under Scrum process management, so there is an overal team learning curve that is ongoing.

Daily stand-up meetings are designed to answer 3 questions: what did you do yesterday, what are you going to do today, and do you have any obstacles in your way? A good indicator that your daily meeting is not following the quick path to conclusion is when somebody actually asks a question. Usually, this shouldn’t happen, although is permissible depending on the context.

We were having issues with daily stand-ups getting way out of hand and conversations between 2 or 3 people (of a 10 person team) taking up 10–15 minutes of time, while the rest of us just sat around waiting for them to finish. After several comments by multiple team members, we have now decided that we would implement a keyword that anyone can shout out at any time they think the daily stand-up is getting off course.

Bologna! I wanted to go with bullshit, but bologna was the 2nd thing that came to my mind and the rest of the team seemed to be ok with that word. What’s great about the new warning signal, is that when somebody gets off track and doesn’t notice, somebody cries Bologna! and they instantly realize “Yeah, I was getting away from the purpose.” Its a great tactic and is serving us well in the first week of implementation. Its still being said every day, but I think we’ll move to point where it may come up once or twice a week at most.

Also, after spending a day with Pete Behrens and another day with David Hussman, I took Pete’s advice and went ahead and went to Mike Cohn, an awesome teacher, and did my scrum master certification. 3rd time in 5 years I’ve been through a scrum course and I just keep learning every time. If you are looking into it, I’d definately recommend Pete or Mike either one. David isn’t a CST that I am aware of, but awesome, awesome agile trainer.

Welcome new CodeBetter member, Patrick Smacchia, the man behind NDepend!

Raymond Lewallen — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 02:29:11 GMT

In case you didn’t notice, CodeBetter has added none other than your favorite static code analysis tool author, Patrick Smacchia! Patrick Smacchia is the author of NDepend.

Patrick brings to the table a wealth of information and experience, and we certainly look forward to reading what he has to say about the trials and tribulations of developing a tool like NDepend, and where its headed in the future. I personally have had the privilidge of knowing Patrick for awhile now and have had many conversations with him about NDepend and the future and features of the tool. Patrick never ceases to amaze me with his visions. He is an exciting person to be around and is very passionate about great software and code metrics.

I could write 2 pages on why I am a big fan of Patricks and we are all thrilled to have him aboard. We certainly needed someone to take up the slack that I’ve left behind, having not blogged in over a month (summertime, kids, work, running user groups, directing code camps and helping with conferences, training, the list goes on and on and on).

A day with a peer and mentor - feed somebody's ego

Raymond Lewallen — Wed, 02 May 2007 03:20:00 GMT

I have come to a clear conclusion. I am increasingly envious of my friends and their abilities, and each day realize just how much more I have to learn. Its exciting to know that I’m lacking in so many ways in regards to technology, and software design in general. It means I have a lot of growing ahead of me and a lot of exciting things to look forward to (IronRuby is now one of them).

I’m going to feed some ego’s now. I’m going to tell you the people that I would pay a lot of money for (I’m broke, btw) and take PTO if I could just sit and pair with them for a day. I can’t pick just one, so I’m going to pick a weeks worth of people. This is non-MSFT btw. Naturally I would spend time with Anders, Krzysztof and Brad A and a slew of others if I could, but I’m not near as interested in learning more about MSFT focused goals as I am about great software design in general.

Jean Paul Boodhoo. This guy is creepy smart and conveys his thoughts very well. Not only do I have a lot to learn about how to design better software from him, I’m sure there are things I need to learn from him on how to teach an unfamiliar audience, which he does on a routine basis.

Scott Bellware. Until I met Scott, I wasn’t sure how I felt about Scott. Now I realize Scott is a shorter version of me, right down to the attitude and haircut. Scott is more outspoken though, for sure. Scott and I share the same passions for things done right and our commitments to our respective communities and spreading the knowledge is hard to rival (David Walker certainly takes the cake when it comes to community contribution and commitment). Scott has had the privilege of working in my type of environment for quite awhile, and has much more experience in my own realm than I do. I certainly have things to learn from Scott.

Jeremy Miller. Um, have you read any of his posts? Do I really need to elaborate on this guy? I think everybody has something to learn from Jeremy.

K. Scott Allen. I really like K. Scott. Its a great guy, easy to hang out with and has a funky hair-do. He’s also incredibly intelligent and could spend a year teaching me what he knows about Asp.Net where I’m lacking.

The first four I just mentioned are great guys. I’ve hung out with each of them in person, gotten to know them outside the realm of the blogosphere and emails and enjoy their company. I know that I can sit with them for extended periods of time, devote attention and feel comfortable.

The last person in my list is Kimberly L. Tripp. Her Sql Server knowledge is incredible, seems to be very personable and is very passionate about what she does. I’m originally a database guy converted to developer, and sometimes really miss my roots. Kimberly is exactly the type of person who could get me so excited again about databases that I could go back and give up writing code.

So there it is. 5 people I would love to spend a day with. 40 hours split evenly amongst that type of talent is worth 1 year of me ramping in my spare time. If you want to be better at your own job, you need to surround yourself with people who are better at it than you are. I could have easily named off just about everybody in my OPML as people I want to spend time with, but these are my top choices right now.

So what about you? Who would you give up a day’s pay or 8 hours of vacation time for?

My life is run on a stack and not a queue

Raymond Lewallen — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 01:51:42 GMT

I blame Microsoft and bloggers for my brain function lately. I just can’t keep up with everything going on, and I don’t really even try to. At any given time, I have 10–15 tabs open in Firefox of webpages that I want to read. And it stays that way. This is how my day goes:

Check email with Gmail. I’m a stickler for keeping my inbox clean and less than 25 items in it at any given time. So I go through my email, mark them with labels, star them and archive them. Right now I have 20+ emails (that I can remember) that I really need to address. Probably more.

Open my rss reader. Go through all the items and flag the stuff I want to read with purple flags. I’ll open several of the items in my browser.

Now by the time I have finished this, I have more email in my inbox again, more unread items show up in my rss reader, a bunch of unread tabs in my browser and work to do. So naturally I work on what I get paid to do, which right now is a business rules engine and entity translators for services to domain objects. In order to not really screw up the team velocity and sprint regression trends, I stay on top of my work all day, not to mention there are deadlines to meet.

More email shows up. More unread rss feeds. More stuff open in my browser from searching for work related stuff.

And my day ends there. I flagged a bunch of blog posts, flagged a bunch of emails, didn’t really read any of them because I can’t keep up with the emails and rss feeds that just keep pouring in. I get a lot of emails from people asking for help on items related to blog posts of mine. I just can’t respond to them all, and it makes me feel bad for not doing so.

Also trying to get a hold of WPF and WCF right now too, and its just hard to find time. My daughter likes to dance when I play guitar and to play hide and seek too, so those items naturally take precedence. I spend an hour at the gym every day Monday through Friday. I also blame Cory, Dan and Jason (especially Jason) for keeping me out too late at night lately (2 am most times because that is when the bars close down). Even though it might have been my idea to go out drinking, its still their fault for agreeing to it.

So much stuff is going on that I only have time to address the most immediate item at any given time, just like a stack. What happens in the morning is the last thing to ever get addressed because of priority levels. I’ve certainly got to do something to get my life going queue style instead so that I can address items and get them done and feel some sort of sense of accomplishment outside of seeing our sprint burndown chart in a nice downward slope of regression. But I get paid to code, not read. My family is my life, so I address that first too. Work and family. When I think about the presentations I have to do, code camps to organize, a user group to run (with the help of other officers, of course), conferences to plan, attend, speak at, whatever the case may call for, books to read, emails to reply to, blog posts to read, blog posts to write, books to write (putting that one off big time), wikis to read, code to play with, ideas to play with, calories to track, miles to bike, software to evaluate, productivty tools to play with, home improvements to finish, watching YouTube videos, and just learning in general (which is my favorite hobby), well, I need a time machine. I’m aging too fast for all of this.

I think a feel a LiveBetter II post brewing, on living with stress and feelings of “non-accomplishment”, because all in all, I’m still a happy person, so something is going right. Its just time to scale back and prioritize some things and just let go.

Did I just describe your day too?

Oh yes, I blame Twitter for occupying too much of my time too. Feel free to follow/add me as friend. http://twitter.com/rlewallen

I promise more technical posts are coming soon, in the spirit of CodeBetter. I’m working on a project where we are doing a few interesting things (a usable EF would be killer right now, because I know what their vision is, and I wish that vision was in place sooner than its going to be) that I will blog about later, including how we ended up with our fake MVC for the web (Monorail was not an option that we could use and I just didn’t have the time to look deeper into Igloo to see how well it would work with our architecture), and how we ended up doing control behavior mapping to custom controls based on workflow status and user roles.

Hydrated a new Developer into the Lewallen family by way of the Child factory: (Off Topic)

Raymond Lewallen — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 14:48:00 GMT

Carson Grant Lewallen was born April 19th, 2007 at 16:17 hours, weighing in a 7 lbs 14 oz and just a hair below 20 inches. Unfortunatly, we still haven’t been able to leave the hospital yet due to some obstacles. Spent the first 24 hours in NICU, which was very uncomforting and caused high anxiety due to the events of last year. However, things are looking well and each day we get told “maybe tomorrow” is when he will get to leave and finally go home, so we’ll see.

More photos can be found here.

Oh how I miss CruiseControl and NAnt

Raymond Lewallen — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:14:47 GMT

Here is a screenshot of my TFS build. 20 minutes. The integration builds have been running for a week now. They are triggered on check-in using a tool called Automoton because TFS does not have this functionallity by default. Most builds are taking over 10 minutes. CC + NAnt, this build would take about 20-30 seconds. The codebase is very small and there are only 265 unit tests so far.