I guess I would consider myself an events butterfly. There is not a week that goes by that I do not attend a user group, special interest group, conference or unconference, networking event or some other form of peer to peer learning and networking.
I was recently asked if going to all of these events was really worth the time. My answer to them is the answer I give to everyone. There is always Read more
LINQ’s .Any() method is under-utilized, given the benefits it brings in making your code briefer, clearer, and more efficient. LINQ in general improves the expressiveness of your collection-manipulating code by using declarative statements instead of imperative foreach loops; .Any() is a great tool in that regard.
Here’s a representative example:
bool hasMissedDeadlines = deliverables .Where(d => d.Deadline < _systemClock.Today) .Count() > 0;I want to determine if my to-do list has any items that are late, so I use .Where() to filter my list of deliverables down to items with a deadline in the past; then I take a .Count() of the resulting list, and see if that number is greater than zero. This is a plausible solution, and our years of SQL lead us to write LINQ this way. But it can be better. Read more
This week I was pleased to sit down and chat with Nolan Egly, our newest Senior Consultant at Headspring. Nolan has been working as a software developer in Austin for years. He was hired here at Headspring after being placed on our famous internal spreadsheet that lists our employees’ “dream” coworkers. That is, if you could work with anyone, who would it be? Apparently it’s Nolan! Read more
At a previous job, I worked for a company that used Subversion for all of its projects. This was a welcome change coming from a TFS and Visual Source Safe background.
We did relatively little work with branches. For the most part, a branch was created only to represent the state we wanted to deploy to production. In other words, everybody worked against trunk, and when we were happy with what we had we would create a branch with the version number as its name, and we would deploy from there. If a hotfix was needed, at least we didn’t have to worry about deploying it along with incomplete features under development; we’d base the hotfix on the version branch and deploy that.
On one occasion, someone needed to make a fairly drastic change to the system. It was a little risky, and would have interfered with the rest of the team if it was performed against trunk, so they made a feature branch for it. About a month later, I was tasked with merging that back into trunk.
This was, shall we say, an Interesting Merge.
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Just in time for Valentine’s Day, three Headspring consultants competed in the annual Austin Accessibility Internet Rally (Austin AIR) hosted by Knowbility.org. Knowbility’s website explains the goal of the rally is “to teach participating web developers and designers about the tools and techniques necessary to make the web accessible to everyone – including people with disabilities.” In addition, participating nonprofits benefit by receiving professional help to build a new or replace an existing site. Judging for the competition lasts a couple weeks, and the winner is announced at an awards ceremony in March.
Headspring-ers Anne Epstein, Mahendra Mavani and Deran Schilling showed up bright and early Saturday morning to form their team, calling themselves the Headspring Hurwitzes (a tribute to our reigning Chief Architect, Kevin Hurwitz). They were assigned to Texas TERA with a mission to breathe life into their stale, outdated website.
From what our coworkers say, Senior Consultant Brandon Barry can go head to head with Jimmy Bogard about the internals of the .NET framework. Recently, he wrote a library for .NET that allows for dynamic querying SQL databases using LINQ syntax, but with no configuration. You can find it on Github.
All in all, he is incredibly knowledgeable Headspring developer, and is known for his affinity for clean, elegant code. In fact, he prefers refactoring rather than having to work around bad code. He is also great proponent for balancing the benefit of tests without sacrificing quality. Here’s what else I learned today:
As I mentioned last week, I’ve started using git recently, specifically a git-to-tfs bridge so that I can avoid as much contact with TFS as humanly possible.
Most of my recent experience has been with subversion, so I have been unlearning that as much as I have been learning git. The most apparent difference right away is what it really means to make a "commit".
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A question I’m frequently asked typically goes something like this:
“I hear about all these new HTML tags, but I don’t have any problem with using
<div>s like I’ve always done. Why should I care?”
The questioners are referring to the new elements introduced with HTML5, including <nav> (which encapsulates a part of your page containing navigation elements), <article> (think of a newspaper story, with its heading, byline, callouts, etc.), and <time>, among others. While it’s true the Web survived for many years without these new elements, there’s no reason to stand on tradition. The new elements provide a number of benefits to both Web developers and end users, and, best of all, you can start using them right away!
From championship-winning sports teams to multi-million dollar companies, strong, cohesive and successful teams take a great amount of hard work, dedication and focus. While many successful teams and organizations credit the strength of the team effort as the reason for their success, there is no doubt great leaders also have a big impact and are a big part of the foundation for a strong team. Think about how Vince Lombardi’s coaching in the NFL or Walt Disney’s inspiration in the entertainment industry left impacting legacies and provided great guidance to their teams. Without leaders like Lombardi and Disney, the success of the Green Bay Packers and the Disney franchise would be different in the history books. Behind great companies, organizations, and teams are instrumental individuals with key leadership characteristics who can propel the results from good to great. Read more
Custom software projects are hard. The Standish Group reported in 2009 that only 33% of software projects are successful! Ouch. There are many strategies to ensure successful delivery of custom software projects. One is strongly related to the relationship between the provider and the client and how the parties work together to respond when a problem arises. How this response is handled sets the tone for either a long-term healthy relationship or a one-time customer. A strong, positive response leads to client retention.
Two and a half years ago, Headspring made a radically unique decision that in retrospect, unlocked our future growth. We focused all of our efforts on keeping every single client that we get. In order to achieve this, it was imperative for us to start by doing the following two things: Read more