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‘Being a developer’ vs ‘Working as a developer’

December 29th, 2011

A career in software development isn’t a hard career to do (assuming some pre-existing analytic, abstract, and critical thinking skills). Nor is it even a hard field to get trained for and find work in. However – some time in the last year or so I’ve become increasingly concious of a difference between two kinds of software developers:

Those who are developers
Those who work as developers

Now – it should go w/ out saying that the first type, is almost always the 2nd type. (ie: people who ARE, work AS developers). But the 2nd type – the people who work as developers – aren’t necessarily always people who ARE developers. Yes – clarity is coming… keep reading.

To me – in 2012 (jumping the gun by 2 days), its completely mind blowing to me that someone can claim to be a software developer, but have none or hardly any of the following: modern smart phone, personal git-hub or other social coding presences and sites like stackoverflow, user group participation, twitter presence(if only for software development purposes!), no personal domain(s) owned (if only for the email address) etc.

To me – if you only program 8-4 M-F when you are being paid by someone, and never code at all for your own fun, side projects, and learning – i have a tough time being placed in the same stereotyped ‘software developer’ class as you. Without even elaborating any further – logic immediately screams that the 8-4 only programmer simply can not be as adaptable, knowledgable, flexible, and therefore able to deliver business value as fast as someone who is a *cough* TRUE *cough* developer.

Most shocking to me though, is no PERSONAL PROJECTS. I view the desire to develop software a symptom of a much larger disease, of which i’m proud to be inflicted by.

That disease is technology.

I love technology. I think we live in thee most fascinating time in history. If you love technology enough to want to be creative with it for a paycheque, how can you NOT be tinkering on the side in your spare time with new cool things.

languages. frameworks. new patterns. new challenges. all make one grow as a software developer.

I’m proud to say i AM a developer, who also enjoys employment to BE a developer. I’m the developer emailing out awesome blog links and articles to our team. I’m the developer always wanting to be involved in any discussion about something cool and shiny that could be used where i work. I’m the developer who will happily jump in the deep-end and get fresh with a knew technology. I’m also the developer who has drown a few times doing that – but thats all part of the fun.

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2011 Reflection

December 22nd, 2011

Goals Accomplished:

- Started condo renos, laying 450 square feet laminate myself
- Purchased 99 Jeep Wrangler Sport
- Made it to cabin @ Seymour Arm, B.C. for first time in 7 years.
- Developed and published first iOS application (Know Your Role)
- Lost 45lbs, and increased physical fitness dramatically
- Ran a total of 1012.0 km in 2011 (assuming little to no running will occur for the last week and a bit)
- New Job / Career advancement
- Raised over $650.00 for Cancer research
- First time to a gulf island

Downsides:

- Serious right ankle sprain
- Smashed my iPhone 4 (yes. i’m literally listing this in my downsides for the year.)
- Left a great job

I don’t believe in resolutions – i just set goals all year and work towards them. Never needed a single day of the year to force me into that mind set, so there is no ’2012′ portion of this post. Deal with it.

All and all – a pretty great year.

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SDLC – who needs em?

November 16th, 2011

Most pure product development shops REALLY understand the benefit of a clear SDLC, and having worked in a super productive Agile shop for over a year prior to my current job… I’m realizing now just how big a difference an SDLC makes.

Any developer I’ve ever met, who has a background in both Agile and Waterfall methodologies, is exposed to the truth that Agile provides far more business value, quicker, to the company. They will usually shout this at the top of their lungs as well, and push the proverbial string against the wall that is Waterfall embedded management.

Being Agile also empowers your developers and results in a far better product and process for everyone. When it comes down to it – only a developer is actually critical to building something. Don’t treat them like a leper with an IQ of 80… Empower them. The company will see the benefits immediately.

In the main time… using Agile approaches; QA doesn’t wait weeks or months to see an item, assumptions and expectations are checked far sooner, clarifications on design are handled much more elegantly, creating useless documentation up front is avoided (becoming more accurate as it emerges, rather than is pre-imagined), and I could go on and on and on.

However… in the abscense of an Agile approach… *ANY* SDLC can benefit a company. Even waterfall *gasp*.

Why companies that think they are ‘awesome’ at Waterfall seem so scared of even the mention of the word Agile perplexes me. The ironic thing is, when Waterfall falls all over its face – which it can do all the time from a variety of situations – the default firefighting approach to fix the fuck-up, is inherently agile in nature anyway!

What do I mean? When some devs have to meet with Business at the last minute to clarify ambiguous or assumed requirements because ‘waterfall’ didn’t produce accurate or correct specifications for implementation and the developers weren’t involved in the design… what happens? Frantic repair, re-deployments, fast editing of docs to be ‘good enough for now’ (truly agile in nature), expedited sign offs, expedited QA/UAT involvement… Fast, rapid, iterative, cross-functional team inclusive… HELLO BUSINESS – Welcome to quasi-Agile.

Why not go balls-deep and NOT have failure after failure, gain more business value in a shorter amount of time, and save a boat load of cash. Use Product Owners, Scrum Masters (Scrum – Agile approach), persona driven use cases, small and agile talented teams w/ the rope they need to do their jobs, and BE TRULY AGILE.

Ad-hoc enhancement request, emails of changing specifications, phone calls that aren’t documented, business not understanding the technology being used to implement the added business values… All of this is what Waterfall really is in practice. Bloated expensive product development timelines, and shitty products are the end result.

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Laminate

August 31st, 2011

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First iOS Application

July 4th, 2011

Since early June, i’ve been challenging myself to learn the iOS SDK and build my first iPhone app. Well.. i’m with in sight of the distance.

It isn’t the most complex UI but it was a great learning experience for the last month. I’m now familiar with and impressed by numerous objective-C / cocoa-touch development patterns and not a bad pile of API’s.

I hope to submit to app store in the next few weeks.

It is a configurable ‘Person – Role’ or ‘Person – Assignment’ management application. After entering some people and roles, you can then assign people to these roles (with a n:1 roles:persons relation). When some rolls are assigned but people aren’t volunteering for the rest – it’s time to volun-tell some folk with the ‘random assignment’ feature. Shaking the phone will delegate the rest of the assignments or rolls to the people remaining.

Pretty simple concept, and I’m following true Lean approach to release a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) before wasting any dev time and introducing complexity before a baseline concept is proven in an experiment with the market.

And – i’m in a good boat; because this isn’t a true Lean Startup company; instead is just a time filling learning application I put together that I intend to give away… my MVP experiment can’t really fail at all! Infact, I’ve dusted off the old white board and already put together a product backlog of 6 or so more features I could add at a later time. These include a more granular randomization/lock-in system, configurable club/company logo, History of assignments by date, person, or role, and a few other goodies.

beta testers *lol* being considered; hit me up!

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Scrum

June 24th, 2011

This week my current company was trained in Scrum; an Agile approach to Software Development.

The product development teams have always used ‘Agile but’ (meaning… we use Agile, but not for x, y, z). This isn’t uncommon for companies. The goal for this training was to get the entire company on board with Scrum nomenclature and approaches.

Some of the interesting, high level take aways for me were:

* Product Owners are busy people
* Product backlogs require weekly grooming, with sufficient details to populate a few sprints out, even tentatively
* Scrum master doesn’t direct, instead they keep the team abiding by scrum best practices
* Scrum masters can’t maintain the same velocity as a 100% developer, even if he’s also a developer
* Story boarding is a very useful exercise
* Acceptance Criteria are vital to have accurate (as must be ‘kevin bacon-able’ to business propositions and business values)
* Sprint reviews are vital to keeping everyone on the same page
* Goal driven dev doesn’t mutually exclude ability to do TDD (Test Driven Dev)
* Epics and Large user stories can be very difficult to break down to user stories and tasks if a product owner isn’t driving it
* Sprint planning needs to take longer and be more inclusive than our current approach for my team.

All in all a very interesting (albeit dry at times for developers) 2 day training course. I love the Agile methodology and now feel more confident in my approach to it, and also more comfortable with the larger ‘Agile/Scrum’ approach as it pertains to a company.

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LulzSec h4ck3rz

June 17th, 2011

endlessly amusing @LulzSec ; check their tweet stream out.

But more importantly – incase you don’t understand what their intent and point is (beyond being entertaining as heck!)… read their 1000′th tweet manifest – available on their releases page.

Hackers have always done their thing; 99% of it you’ll never ever know of. This group is trying to illustrate 2 things that most computer science grads know:

1) Security is a myth

2) People are idiots

Re the latter point – they truly are. Don’t blame a hacker for posting your acct details, blame the people owning the system they hacked, and yourself. You have only 1 acct compromised when you have unique passwords for everything… but you’ve just lost your entire online identity if you use the same pw across the internet. The stat on non IT industry employes who actually do this, is probably single digit.

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Bottles

June 11th, 2011

Some of the returnables collected for Canary early cancer detection research.

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Site re-vamp

June 11th, 2011

I decided to update a few things on my server and, long story short: nuked my site. Intentionally i might add; I’ll be restoring the last 5 months of posts when i have some time in the next few weeks.

Enjoy

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