Note: I split this post into two to make it more digestible. For background and context, see my post Shiny things. TL; DR Background and definition The Magpie is misunderstood and provides a good model for learning The V model of learning (contrasted to the model of T-shaped people) attempts to maximise intersection points in knowledge to enable …
Rabbit holes I disappear from time to time. No, not in the physical sense. Rabbit holes are everywhere. I follow them and emerge a couple of days (or weeks) later, hopefully wiser. For illustration, I wandered through Docker land for a whole 6 months. That particular rabbit hole went deep. The weird and wonderful container landscape is still …
I’ve been playing with Vagrant , an easy way to set up virtual machines for development purposes. Vagrant provides a simple command line interface paired with a setup script (VagrantFile) in Ruby to provision virtual machines , share folders between the host and the virtual machine and to provide port forwarding . I’ve been using it to …
Git , the distributed source control system is fast becoming the de facto standard, at least in the open source arena. Although it comes with a bit of a learning curve, the advantages of using Git over more traditional SCMs like Subversion and TFS far outweighs the investment of time necessary to learn it.
I’ve had some interesting discussions on the management of work through user stories. A lot of teams, those starting to use agile techniques, seem to have some uncertainty around common topics: The theory behind story points and why they are preferred over estimations in hours Why story points and velocity are self-correcting measures The …
Lean Software Development : An Agile Toolkit, Mary Poppendieck and Tom Poppendieck . A great resource on how the lean principles from product manufacturing can be applied unto software development. You can find a good overview in their 2002 paper here (pdf) and the Wikipedia article on Lean .
The Passionate Programmer: Creating a Remarkable Career in Software Development (Chad Fowler) and The Pragmatic Programmer (Andrew Hunt and David Thomas).
I’ve found podcasts a good way to spend your time when you’re stuck in traffic - here’s a list of my favourite developer podcasts in alphabetical order : .NET Rocks - still one of the best podcasts out there. The banter is fun to listen too, and they have a wide variety of guests and topics on .NET. Also presents a large (but fun) …