Recently there has been a lot of talk around my work place about ease of adoption on a software project... essentially how easy is it for someone who has never looked at the code to go into TFS, download the code and run it and the unit tests.  I am a firm believer that I should be able to simply open my source control window, and double click on the solution file.  There shouldn’t be any third party items that HAVE to be installed separately, no libraries that need to be referenced out of the GAC, none of that.  In my eyes, if I have to do any more than a simple double click and run the project is a giant failure.  I mean it, at this point I think it would be appropriate to delete all of your code, and go register yourself back in school because you do not deserve to be developing on an enterprise level.

Now here’s why.

1)      Recently I’ve taken on a new project, and it’s taken me two weeks to find all of the third party libraries that I needed, install them, and configure my machine to actually work with this project and the others I have installed.  This is caused mostly by versioning issues, when the new project is expecting a different version of a DLL than I currently require for something else, who should win?  Well, the second I got it working I pulled everything into a library folder and checked it into our source control.  This took me all of about half an hour to accomplish once I got it working, and if I could have saved myself the previous two weeks or non-sense work I would have greatly appreciated it.

2)      Talking with the developers on the same project as I had all the issues with, they had the exact same problems as I had, and actually listed it as one of their biggest headaches. 

3)      The ability to move the code to a build server.  For those of you who have never had the luxury of using a build server I strongly suggest that you go out and download one such as TeamCity by Jetbrains.  It is one of those things that I’ve just started to use and I could not justify stopping.  It makes deployments as easy as copy and paste.  Also, when you’re working with other developers who might not be as anal about running unit tests as we are, you can set up the build server to automatically run them every time code is checked in.  Guess what that means, no more downloading someone else’ broken code when you get latest!

4)      And finally, why not?  For the half an hour that it took me to fix it, it probably would have taken 20 minutes to do it right the first time...

The most common excuse that I’ve heard in regards to this from other projects is we don’t have the time to do it right, so we made it work the only way we knew how to.  At what point did our profession become more about getting it done, and less about getting it done right?  I’m sorry but I don’t know of a single user that would object if I said I was going to spend an extra half an hour on a three month project to make it so that any changes they ever wanted would take half the time to implement... but maybe that’s just me...

Hello Everyone,

I've been working on some chanes to the blog backend, and as part of that I'm moving my RSS feed to feed burner (now hopefully it will be a bit faster, and actually update like it's suppose to).  With that said, can everyone please update their RSS feed to point to:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/DeveloperSymposium

or click here to do it the easy way

I will have to shut off the old link when I upload the new version, which might not be for a while but please update now anyway!

Thank you!

I am what I refer to as a developer by birth.  I have long subscribed to the school of thought that there are two types of software developers currently practicing in our industry, there are those like myself who were born with this gift that allows them to just kind of see the way things fit together, and the reason for wanting to put them together.  There are few questions that we do not know the answer to, both professionally and personally, however acting on those answers is entirely different.  This group of developers tends to be highly practical individuals, everything follows a flow of logic and even though we may not know every term from every book on the subject we are practically obsessed with the profession that is we eat, sleep, and breathe everything related to development from a mental standpoint whether it really has anything to do with code or not.

Then there are those developers who are trained to do what they do, either officially through the use of post secondary education institutes, or through back room training found in books and practical experience.  These developers make slightly less sense to me because it seems that everything is over thought, over analyzed, or just plain too much by the book.  These developers are the obsessed type who leave work for the day hoping to read the next book on the subject so they can learn two more terms… even though most of the knowledge they memorize will never be put into place, they know the words to describe what they do not do.

I think the best way to look at the difference between the two is to take a real life situation not related to code in any way.  Let’s take the example of changing a tire on a car.  The second group will read the owner’s manual to find out where the spare tire is stored, and religiously study the book numerous times before they so much as open the trunk to retrieve the tire.  Once all of the possible details are taken into consideration, and everything is mentally mapped out then and only then will they remove the spare tire and begin their task.  If they run into a problem they first go back to the book to ensure that this scenario was not covered, than act on whatever knowledge they can to work through the task at hand.  The first group of developers however, will pull out the tire, jack, and tire iron; jack the car up; and start beating on the tire with the tire iron until it eventually comes lose.  If they run into a problem while changing the tire, it is only a matter of time before their analytical minds discover a solution, no matter how crude or unconventional in nature.

I am not here to say which group is better or worse, I mean I take great pride in belonging to the first group but would never say that someone from the second group is not as good as I am just because they belong to that group… that’s usually something said with proven evidence and countless hours of frustration on my part trying to find the right book for them to read to understand what I am talking about but, I digress.  My problem lies with all of the HR focused idiots who rate me not on the quality of my work, not on my ability to solve impossible tasks, and not by my utter love of being a developer… but rather those who rate me based on the last book that I read, the number of fancy terms I can throw out, and finally how smart I sound as opposed to how smart I am.  It is truly a sad day today as I realize that how smart I am has nothing to do with what I know, but rather how well I am liked to those HR focused dumbasses that seem to hold their rubber sticks over our progression.  I think this is where we have truly failed, by allowing a bunch of rubber stick carrying dictators instruct us on how much we know and my question to them is simple… when was the last time you wrote something?

Or would it?  I found myself pondering the newest of my potential creations the other day, so last night I decided to do some searching for potential web site names.  I figured whatever I call it I want it to tie into the URL somehow, for both search optimization and just common sense.  I didn’t find anything that was actually available (surprise surprise eh?) so I guess its back to the drawing board, but I have to wonder what the importance of the name really is…

Than this morning I was searching for Iphone Apps because that seems to be my newest obsession.  I noticed something remarkable… I was selecting applications I wanted to investigate into further based purely on the applications Icon, and mostly the apps name.  I know the old saying goes do not judge a book by its cover which I found to be quite remarkable that I would be doing such a thing, and I have to wonder how many millions of people are like that as well…

Someone once told me that it really doesn’t matter what your application does, or if it even works on release date but rather how it looks to the user, and their first impressions.  I hate to admit it, but I think this is true too!  Countless websites I’ve closed because I couldn’t read the text because of coloring, or because there was ads everywhere, or for various other non-technical reasons… And I’m a Developer!

It is a truly sad thing to realize that every line of code I write means nothing to the average user if they don’t like the way my application looks at first glance, that something so trivial as the wrong Icon choice can turn someone away from what may be beautiful code and the following beautiful functionality.

I cannot help but wonder if this is what has made Google so popular among people.  Take a look at Google versus Yahoo!  Google has nothing but a clean interface, no BS graphics, and a text box to search with.  Yahoo! Has shit going in every which direction and your eyes actually have to search the page to find the text box to start typing in…  Well, at least Microsoft got it right this time with Bing…