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.

Announcing: Big Visible Cruise

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.

Great Presentation / Story

This is a great presentation format that I ran across while browsing slideshare. I really like the story, the format, and the delivery….

| View | Upload your own

Vista Ultimate – The One Month Meltdown

I’ve been using Vista for over a year now and I’ve been very happy with it overall. I’ve primarily used Business Edition, but I switched about a month ago to Ultimate Edition. The graph below shows my stability report over a one month period (higher is better)…

Today I re-installed Business Edition. Maybe now I can get a little work done.

A Note To All Software Developers…

I don’t want your icon on my desktop.
I don’t want your icon in my taskbar.
I don’t want you to run on startup.
I don’t need a quicklaunch icon.

When in doubt, just ask.

Remote Pairing

I’ve been spending roughly 4 – 8 hours a day doing remote pair-programming lately. Although there are always connectivity issues (usually once or twice per day), it’s still only a minor nuisance. Overall, I’m really enjoying the experience and it’s starting to feel pretty close to side-by-side pairing.

The tools that I use on a daily basis include Microsoft SharedView for screen sharing and Skype for voice and video. The combination of these two tools seems to work very well (even over wireless).

SharedView is still in beta, but it is a very nice, minimal, and responsive tool. With the exception of the ads (integrated into the tool), I’m impressed. I’ve used many other tools in the past but this one just seems to fit the way I work better. The features like the ability to see other mouse pointers, clicking, and highlighting is a very nice feature.

Right now, the only thing that consistently bugs me is the quality of my headset (junk). I’m hoping to pick up a new one in the next couple of days.