Simple redirects

You may want to check out the "Top 6 List of Programming Top 10 Lists" from Coding Horror. It's a good bunch of stuff from a really good site. I particularly enjoyed his book list compared to Steve Yegge's, who, by the way, is another blogger worth reading.

Rules of thumb for successful software development

(This post is based on an email I sent to a friend and coworker who had just had a long day at a new job.)

I will now share my very finite wisdom (with regards to software development):

1. Get a little better every day. Consciously. Don't ever get worse. At the very least break even. Here's an article with some tips. I personally find that you can work an hour a day on average just making things better and a) no one bugs you about not getting your work done and b) life will get easier. People will follow this example generally once you start seeing success.

2. Don't try to get too much better too fast. People don't like change. Plus you can do little changes without needing to do a lot of convincing, and big changes tend to fail, encouraging people to not try it again. Little steps. You may even have to hold yourself (and/or team) back on these sometimes, but trust me, it's worth it.

3. The Joel Test. Shoot for all twelve, but go for them one at a time.

4. Read like crazy. Technical stuff. Software stuff. Comic books. Sci-fi novels. Old-school detective novels. Histories of religion. Whatever. I personally go for an every other approach; one tech book, one solely for fun. Or I may have one I'm working through, and one I'm just enjoying going at the same time. Of course, I enjoy reading. I do believe that studying something, anything, will help keep the brain sharp and you do better throughout the day. Hobbies are good for you. Maybe yours isn't reading, maybe you'll play guitar or learn a language or something else, but you will need to spend some time on the tech stuff. This is an industry and a job that requires constant learning to be good, and I think that's a plus. Get in the habit of constantly learning. Fortunately, once you find a subject you're into, it's easy to get in the habit.

5. Actually use the stuff you read. The Pragmatic Programmer is a great book that a lot of people have read and then ignore or forget to use. I know I have. (in fact, I should reread it now.) Definitely start there. With that being said, only use what makes sense and take all advice with a big grain of salt. Throw out what doesn't work. This is really a part of XP that I feel people forget. Basically, screw the rules. There are no hard and fast rules. There are a lot of good ideas that you see out there, learn what you can and then use your brain.

And that's about it It's really all summed up in tip #1. I'm a big fan of continuous, slow change. Tortoise and the hare and all that.

The sites I have found most helpful and where I've gleaned most of the info are now listed in the right nav. The Joel on Software subreddit has probably been the most handy since through this I have found a lot of other good writers and/or articles.

So that's my advice. Print that out, take it and add $2 or so and it's worth a cup of coffee at any local Starbucks. You probably knew most of it already. Hopefully it at least made a halfway-decent blog post.

Here's to better software. Good luck.

About Me

Hi, my name is Casey, and this is my site.

A little (or a lot) about me:

I grew up on a dairy farm in rural Pennsylvania, driving tractors, feeding cows, and doing all sorts of farm-related chores. I can milk a cow if I need to, though I never did much and haven't in a long time. I'm not afraid of getting my hands dirty, and I know what it means to put in day's work. Now, to be fair, I haven't worked as hard as my dad, brother, and grandfather do (or did) in a long time, and I'm lucky that way. Any time I've heard praise for being a hard worker I've gone home and seen actual hard work and realized the studying and coding wasn't so tough after all.

I went to college at Binghamton University (SUNY), majoring in computer science. Going in to college the only thing I could do on a computer was play solitaire on Windows 95; I didn't even know the difference between the C: and A: drives. But then, 1996 was boom times for computer programming, and I wanted a job where I could maximize the paycheck to time-spent-working ratio, and weekends off. I learned about computers, played a little rugby (poorly, in my case), took some fun classes, and met a lot of people. By my senior year I got bit by learning bug, and I started to see that there was more out there than simply a job programming.

I graduated and moved to Boston in the fall of 2000. I went to work at a web consulting company called TVisions (later re-branded as Molecular), working on a lot of different projects with new technologies. I learned a lot while I was here, both in terms of technology and software development processes, and I met a lot of great people. A lot of those people became good friends, and there are a few that have definitely influenced how I work today in a very positive way.

While at Molecular, I decided to scratch that learning itch I acquired in undergrad, and I started grad school nights at Northeastern University. Web consulting was good, but at the time I wanted some more technical depth as opposed to an MBA, so I quit the job to finish up the Master's degree with a year of full time study.

Grad school full time was great. I got to immerse myself and really learn like crazy. I was working a lot more hours than I had been, but it was stimulating, and I loved it. My last semester I took a approximation algorithms class with Prof. Rajmohan Rajaraman, which was a great experience; this was my second class with Raj, and he is one of the best instructors I have ever had. I also did an independent study with Prof. Ronald Williams, (report (pdf) and code (.tgz)), which was great, and I learned a great deal with this and through the A.I. Seminar which he introduced me to. This experience was great in that it really gave me a look at the academic world, and how rewarding it can be to work on something simply to learn something new, and to follow your interests wherever they take you. Special thanks to professors Futrelle and Aslam for their influence, as well.

Upon graduation, I spent the summer looking for a job and wondering what to do next. I got a temp job editing XML with a friend of mine for some money to tide me over when I fell into a six-week gig at Simulation Technologies Incorporated (STI) working on simulation software for the Army. Two weeks into that they hired me full time, and got bought by Anteon, who a year later was bought by General Dynamics, and became part of General Dynamics Information Technology. I'm still on the same project, working with the same great people. Over the last 2+ years the program and the process of developing it have seen marked improvements. I'm really proud to have taken a leading role in this, and I hope that I've had an overall positive influence, and that I've helped out where I could.

Mix in the odd freelance gig and standard home-geekery into the mix, and that history brings us to today. I'm still living in the Boston area, I'm still developing software, and I'm still enjoying it. I've learned a lot over the years, lessons I'd like to share, since the best lessons came from others sharing with me. I don't have answers, but I've got some good ideas. I can tell you what generally works for me, and I can tell you where I've gone wrong. Take it all with a grain of salt, use your own judgement, and it just might help.

Here's to better software. Good luck.

boardman.biz launched!

...well, sort of.

I had set up everything to host out of my apartment, but RCN blocks port 80, making things less handy. Since I really didn't have much I wanted to post yet outside of text, I decided grad school tuition could go towards hosting this for a while as opposed to running on a different port. I also figure that this will keep the site up if I need to boot into windows.

I had the home machine set up mostly as personal source control with subversion anyway.

I'll be working on getting the redirects working, getting the links cleaned up, old projects back up, et cetera, as well as some handy posts up here.

Stay tuned.