Friday, July 23, 2010

I’ve been programming for X years … now what?

You’ve been a programmer for some number of years.

You are stuck in a rut and bored.

You still like programming but you need to do something new.

Is this you?

Career development for programmers has always been a sticky subject. The most traditional path is into management, even if the programmer doesn’t have any management skills or interest in management. This leads to disgruntled and bad managers which only aggravates the career development cycle for future programmers.

Some (usually larger) companies offer a senior level technical track, often titled “Technical Lead” or “Software Architect”. The duties are different than that of a manager, but still involves leading other programmers in some manner.

continue here

Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Agile Anti-Patterns - a discussion

Some practices which harm the way we adapt to agile way of working or in a way sort of bad practices which are counter productive. They may very well push back the organizations which are still testing the waters of going agile.

1 - End of the day integration

2 - Let us keep the refactoring tasks for later

3 - Unit testing the complex pieces is enough

4 - Move the iteration until all the user stories are done

5 - Let us try to do as much as possible during the iteration

6 - Comment the test as it is breaking the build and we will come to it later

7 - Retrospectives are not adding much value, will save time if we skip it

8 - We are doing continuous integration so we are already agile

9 - Most of the user stories are high priority

Monday, April 5, 2010

REST and SOAP: When Should I Use Each (or Both)?

The two approaches for interfacing to the web with web services, namely SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) and REST (Representational State Transfer). Both approaches work, both have advantages and disadvantages to interfacing to web services, but it is up to the web developer to make the decision of which approach may be best for each particular case