The Sherpa Project

I was excited to see James put up 22books. The site is off to a great start and reading is something that I’m very passionate about. I read a lot of books and I frequently check in with others about what they are reading.

A tradition that I’ve had over the past ten or so years of my career has been to ask others “What books have you read that have changed your life?”

I ask this question for a couple of reasons…

• It gives you an idea of an individual’s personality.
• It gives you an idea of where a person’s values and belief system are.
• It helps you understand a person’s world-view
• It keeps my queue of books-to-read fresh

I’ve asked this to quite a few people over the years. I’ve asked co-workers, friends, managers, CEOs, and clients. Over the years of asking this question, I’ve never regretted it (although I have had some people that declined to answer it).

I love that James has integrated this concept into 22books as a list category. I’m excited to see what others add to their list.

If you’re interested, my list is published on the site. Some of these books are fairly straight-forward in their contribution to my favorites list and others have stories behind them. Regardless of the history, I can certainly recommend all of them.

Happy reading!

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been pulling together a simple Information Radiator for CruiseControl.net. The idea behind the project is to use the power of visualizations to provide simple, visible, and informative displays that expose the current-state of your automated continuous integration builds.

I threw this app together very quickly a week or so ago and I’ve been amazed at how addictive it’s become. In our team room, we have a dedicated monitor that is always running the application. The result is that you know exactly where the builds stand as soon as you enter the room.

I initially wanted to put this together as a temporary solution to picking out what items we will use to show our build status. We always bounce back and forth about Nabaztag, orbs, lava lamps, and other physical things to show our build status. It’s usually easier to find an extra monitor than it is to get a purchase request approved for a wireless-enabled rabbit. Big Visible Cruise is the same idea, it’s just a visualization instead of a physical device. Judging by how much we all enjoy seeing it, it will probably stick around in addition to any physical device we pick up.

You can find out more about the project at http://code.google.com/p/bigvisiblecruise/. After the holiday I’ll post some pictures and explain how we are utilizing the big display in our team room.

In the meantime, you can likely get an idea from looking at the display while it’s monitoring three different projects in the following screen shot…

This shows that I have three projects (Foo, Bar, and Some Project) being run on my CCNet server. In this example Foo and Bar are successful and Some Project is broken.

The other state that isn’t represented in the pic above is the “building” state. When a project is building, the row representing the project will turn yellow.

By default, BVC will poll every 15 seconds. I recommend using BVC with CCTray so that you have a big visual display along with auditory clues about your build process.

Big Visible Cruise is being released under the MIT license.

If you’re interested in WPF and/or information visualization, I’d love any contributions
I plan on providing some interesting visualizations over the next couple of months. Let me know what you’d like to see on the RoadMap page.

CodeMash has started! To see what’s going on, check out technorati and flickr.
I just attended the keynote session by Neal Ford. I have to say that it was one of the best keynotes that I’ve seen in a long time. The session was “Domain Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm.”

I’ve heard that the slides will all be posted. I’ll update this post with a link to the deck when it is published.

Back in 1999, there was a site named dreamless.org.

Unfortunately the site closed after a couple of years and it hasn’t come back. Dreamless was an amazing place with some amazing people during a crazy time. I could go on for hours talking about how great the site and many of the ideas discussed on the forums were.

The only traces of dreamless that still exist are a mention on Wikipedia and the archives that can be retrieved through the Wayback Machine. You can still access a few links deep here.

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