Not having worked in industry for all that long I still have many memories of the way software engineering was taught at University. I had an awesome time and experience at University but I think there’s something about academic institutions that severely affects their ability to keep up with industry. I would definitely like to go into teaching one day as I had ball tutoring but I don’t think I could ever become a real academic because their velocity (forgive the poor agile pun) is too slow for me.

Andy blogs about this far better here than I could in any post. Definitely good reading!

Yesterday I came in close contact with the horrible stench of a backport. No one really likes backporting code (all good programmers can identify the risks involved) but this one turned into a real stinker when a few other volatile elements were added to the mix. A poor release plan resulted in a day-before-the-release backport, and the release cycle that has been slipping further away from development cycles meant that the code required backporting into multiple branches! Why a stench?

Read more “The Stench Of A Backport”

Some open source projects (especially those that don’t have a critical mass for usage just yet) are notoriously bad for documentation or just getting it up and running. Over the last two weeks I have had a pretty good experience with a number of projects. So thanks to the following projects for being useful and easy to use:

• WordPress.org – The blog software I am using. Installed in less then 10 minutes.
• ViewCVS – Awesome tool for a graphical CVS repository browser. Also useful for doing nice visual diffs and retrieving deleted files out of the Attic without knowing their names! After getting the only prerequisite that not been met (RCS) installed, running a start up script got it going straight away.
• Mambo Server – Currently playing around with it as my CMS. Fantastic documentation and installed in less than 5 minutes.
• Subversion – A replacement being developed addressing issues with CVS.

The last couple of days at work have been physically and mentally draining because of the large amount of time that we have spent in iteration planning. The time devoted to these activities are well spent, but I was stunned to think of how little time I have spent in a formal meeting that has lasted for more than hour or two since leaving my former job. It doesn’t surprise me that I have been more productive with having spent less time in meetings, but what does surprise me is how low my tolerance for long, drawn out meetings now is.

Here are a couple of reasons why:
Read more “Can someone OD on a meeting?”