Agile RTP – Andy Hunt on May 6th

If you’re anywhere near Raleigh on May 6th, be sure to check out the Agile RTP meeting. We’ve got Andy Hunt coming to talk and I’m sure it’s going to be worth your time to attend. The title of the talk is Refactoring Your Wetware.

If I could point to two or three people that have shaped my thoughts about programming and development, Andy would be at the top of that list.

If I could only recommend one book to anyone doing development, it would be The Pragmatic Programmer. The book certainly changed the way that I think and has certainly shaped my career. Interestingly, it’s the only (at least partially) technical book that made my list of books that changed my life.

If you’re in the area (or if you feel like taking a road trip), be sure to come by and see Andy talk and participate in the discussion at Agile RTP.

Twitter In Plain English

I’ve turned into a Twitter junkie. There’s just something about it that makes me smile.

If you don’t get it (I didn’t at first either), check out this great video that I just ran across from Common Craft … on Vimeo…

Twitter in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

10 Weeks Later…

I’ve been very quiet on my blog for a while now, but I wanted to get everybody up to date on a few things…

#1) First and foremost, I’m a dad

Whitney and I had our first child (Haley Kay Carey) on January 30th. Everyone is doing wonderful and I’m loving being a dad. Right now, this is where the majority of my focus has been channeled. Haley is doing awesome, Whitney is doing awesome, and I’m doing awesome.

You can find our pictures of Haley on Flickr at: http://flickr.com/photos/thecareyfam/tags/haley/

#2) If you’re interested in what I’m doing (until I get back to blogging more), I’m using Twitter frequently. It’s much easier to do the micro-blog thing with Twitter.

You can find my Twitter profile at: http://twitter.com//bencarey

#3) I created a small web page to hold the links to my small projects and experiments. There’s not much on the site right now, but there will be as time moves on. I have a lot of little experiments that I’d like to try and this will probably be where I link them up (I’m sure I’ll blog about them as well).

The new site is: http://www.hellokensho.com

#4) I launched Omakase. This was a little idea to experiment with Rails, iPhone development, and some ideas for exploring ways to make micro-applications. Omakase does one thing… it makes decisions for you. I’ll post more about it after I finish cleaning it up a bit. The site was written for the iPhone, but it does have a traditional browser version as well. Currently, the browser site looks the best in Safari.

You can find Omakase at: http://www.iloveomakase.com

#5) I moved my blog and site host over to Media Temple. As part of that move, I wiped out all of the categories for my old blog entries. I did this on purpose. I do blog about a mixture of items (technology, business, development, life, travel, etc.) and I decided that all of the categories just weren’t worth the effort to maintain them.

I’ll get back to blogging, speaking, and the various communities before too much longer. For now, I’m enjoying a bit of a break and soaking up the new addition to the family.

Building Software Like Curitiba

I presented a lightning talk at the Agile RTP meetup this past week. As promised, here’s the slides (cc-by/sa)…

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Nature Doesn’t Have A Design Problem

A great quote from Cradle to Cradle…

“Consider this: All ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little over a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.”

- Cradle To Cradle

Seed Conference

I just returned from the Seed Conference and all I can say is wow. This was a wonderful, thought-provoking, and inspirational event. If another one comes up, I highly recommend attending.

There was a lot of interesting information that was presented both directly and in-between the lines of the talks. It’s great to see so many inspiring individuals giving talks and hanging out at the conference. There were a ton of fresh ideas and a strong sense of innovation that was felt throughout the day.

Carlos Segura, Jason Fried, Edward Lifson, and Jim Coudal all gave great talks with good content.

If I had to boil it down to a few over-arching themes – the conference was really about truth, happiness, pride, innovation, and getting real.

I also can’t say enough about the location of the event. As someone who sits in a typical office environment most of the week, it was refreshing to be in an environment that encourages learning and has inspiration at every turn. It was also nice to be surrounded by individuals that are pushing the boundaries of our industry and unsatisfied with the status quo.

Over the next week or so, I’ll try to get around to posting some of the notes that I have from the event (1/2 a Moleskine full).

CodeMash – Don’t Miss It

CodeMash is a wonderful conference. This will be the second year of the conference and it’s well worth your time to attend. Unfortunately, I’m not going to make it this year (baby on the way), but I would highly recommend that you check it out if you get a chance.

There’s a great lineup of talks with some great speakers (Scott Hanselman, Jim Holmes, Neal Ford, Bruce Eckel, Joe O’Brien, Dave Donaldson, Josh Holmes, Dick Wall, and many others).

It’s certainly $175 well spent.

Books That Changed My Life

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!

Wisdom from The Tao Of Programming

From The Tao Of Programming…

A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master: “How long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it?’”

“It will take one year,’” said the master promptly.

“But we need this system immediately or even sooner! How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it?”

The master programmer frowned. “In that case, it will take two years.”

“And what if I assign a hundred programmers to it?”

The master programmer shrugged. “Then the design will never be completed,” he said.

So true.

Stay small.

BVC 0.5 Ready

Big Visible Cruise has moved up to 0.5.

Here are the highlights…

• Support for the Java-flavor of Cruise
• Support for the Ruby-flavor of Cruise
• The ability to selectively display projects (all projects are shown by default)
• The ability to change the display name of the projects that are shown

All of the new items are mostly documented in the BigVisibleCruise.exe.config file in the 0.5 zip file.

If you are going to use BVC, you need to make sure that your cruise implementation exposes project XML over http (take a look at the config file for some examples).

Now that these items are implemented, the fun stuff should start soon. I want to get some new visualizations in before the 1.0 release.

It’s still somewhat rough around the edges, but it seems to work pretty good so far.

If you run into any issues (or have any enhancement requests), you can put them in as issues on the project site.