Entries Tagged as 'Software Engineering'

Monday, March 8th, 2010

Moving to scrum: breakin’ the law

Well, part of the whole idea is that scrum isn’t a hard-and-fast set of rules right? I had some meetings at another office last week which necessitated moving out our first sprint review and retrospective a couple days. So if one of the guiding principals of scrum (and agile in general) is that the dates [...]

Wednesday, February 17th, 2010

moving to scrum: The First Planning Poker

That could have gone a lot better.
I had originally prepared the product backlog with stories that were way too large. I think that I was confusing the role of the Scrum Product Owner and the XP Customer a bit. I was worried about “being polluted.” After reviewing the Scrum planning process again, I realized that [...]

Tuesday, February 16th, 2010

Converting from agile-mumble to Scrum: the introduction

I’ve been a convert to Agile for almost a decade now. I was first exposed to it when I was working at a start-up called Bootleg Networks as a Development Lead (don’t bother looking it up, it is long lost to time). I’d just come from six years at Microsoft where Waterfall was the only [...]

Thursday, October 8th, 2009

Grant Skinner’s Things Every Flash Developer Should Know talk

One of the sessions that I was really looking forward to seeing at MAX was Grant Skinner’s “Things Every Flash Developer Should Know.” I’ve really been inspired by some of his work and although I’d seen his slides (they are posted on his site), I wanted to see him present it. I’m hoping that they [...]

Monday, September 14th, 2009

some code for a change

I’ve written this function a zillion times, so I decided to post it on my blog. Yes, it could do more error checking (what if that new returns a NULL? what if an exception is thrown?). But it does more than zero error checking, so there you go. This is super useful if you are [...]

Sunday, June 28th, 2009

Server-based DRM solutions are hostile to consumers

I have a long history with DRM (Digital Rights Management): I worked on the Windows Media 7 Encoder team; I worked at two different internet video startups; and as the owner of record label, I experimented with some of the very first paid digital download solutions (all long lost to internet history at this point).
When [...]

Monday, March 9th, 2009

Joel Spolsky’s love letter to program management

Joel Spolsky wrote a love letter to program management on his blog. For the most part, it is a pretty reasoned and reasonable description of what a “good” program manager at Microsoft (and Fog Creek) is like. In my career at Microsoft, about 25% of the program managers fit that bill. The problem was that [...]

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

iPhone shuffle usability suck

My iPhone is the fifth iPod I’ve owned over the years, so I’m pretty familiar with how they work. One thing that has been bugging me about the iPhone though is that there was no shuffle mode without going into a playlist and hitting the shuffle button at the top of the list. This seems [...]

Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008

Nice discussion of white box and developer-driven testing in Google Chrome comic book

I debated copying the scans from blogoscoped.com or referencing the images here, but I decided instead to refer you to the appropriate pages to be a good blog citizen.
Getting Scott McCloud to write a comic book announcing your product is a great idea. He did a great job distilling some complicated stuff into a very [...]

Sunday, August 31st, 2008

Nice C++ resource

Bob Archer has posted a nice page showing where the different C++ symbols come from. Much faster than trying to load visual studio help and searching for the header section of the topic…
C++ Standard library symbols