I spent about an hour last night reading through Francesco Cirillo’s e-book The Pomodoro Technique. Up until this point I knew the basics of the technique, but I really wanted to drill down and get the details. I won’t explain those here - visit http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/ to get the lowdown. What I want to talk about [...]

Our team got to spend a few days with Jared Richardson this week, talking tech leadership, agile, and automated testing. At some point during the opening day’s discussion, I related the story of how I initially got into Test Driven Development (TDD) and how it seriously ramped up my productivity and decreased my defect count.
In [...]

I’m currently making my second trip through Jared Richardson’s excellent book Career 2.0: Take Control of Your Life. In the “Public Speaking” chapter, one of the recommended avenues for public speaking practice is Toastmasters. I first heard of Toastmasters…you guessed it, on my first trip through the book. Shortly after returning home from NFJS St. [...]

A few days ago I pontificated on my need to choose a new “Language of the Year.” Right now I’m attempting to choose between Scala and Clojure. If nothing else, I’ve learned from this exercise that asking the community for feedback is a GOOD thing. Your comments have been very helpful.
To summarize:

As far as the [...]

I recently gave a 90 minute talk at work covering quite a bit of ground related to Agile Software Development. If I had to sum up agile development in one word, it would be FEEDBACK. Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt give one of the best definitions of agile I’ve ever seen in their book, Practices [...]