I _Really_ Don't Know

Well, I've just got back from a week in Redmond. It rained.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, being interviewed by some of the world's finest techies at Microsoft's main campus in Redmond.

Well, it's the end of the year. Well, almost. I've just come home from Egg for the last time as an employee. I'm sure I'll drop back in to see a few people, but I'll be off the payroll as of December 31st. That's kinda scary, but it gives me some time to find the right thing to go to next.

Demo to the MS guys happened today - after I got back from work for the last time. They seemed really interested in the stuff we've built and things like content inheritance and stuff. Well chuffed.

Wahey.

We've described the extensions we've made to MS CMS to the team in Redmond and they're all gee'd up to have a look at it, so I'm trying to get dates sorted to demo it to them remotely.

Who moved my cheese? by Spencer Johnson

What a fantastic book. (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0740737023/ref=sr_aps_books_1_1/202-9329566-9272657) Spencer Johnson talks in a wonderfully childish, condescending, even patronising way about how we all, as individuals, cope with and manage change. His book has taken many organisations by storm. It took almost all of Hong Kong by storm.

But what do you do when people are in denial? When people blame others, constantly, for their own aversion to change?

We've started doing TDD and Continuous Integration a bit more formally and have brought together a toolset to support this on the .Net platform. For reference this is currently:

Visual Studio.Net - IDE Visual SourceSafe - Configuration Management nUnit - Unit Test Framework CruiseControl.Net - Continuous Integration Process nAnt - .Net Build Tool FXCop - Coding Standards validator DevPartner Profiler - Performance Analysis and Test Coverage

Morgan Skinner, MS Developer Support Guru and all round bloody nice guy has finally gotten around to starting a blog - rather than using MSDN as his own...

Morgan's Blog http://www.morganskinner.com/weblogx/

Well, we've finally moved to Derby (Egg that is, not me). That means an hour and a half commute each way for a while at least.

The new office is pretty impressive. Half of a large tin shed, but with nice desks, new machines with plenty of grunt and I managed to get dual-monitors into the spec for all developers' machines. If you haven't tried being 'Tommy Two Tellies' as Morgan Skinner has insisted on calling me for the past 6 months then I strongly recommend it. Microsoft Research are doing some measurements of productivity gains for high concentration tasks, such as development work, so look there for some stats soon.

I've been talking to a few friends for a while about adding object modelling into XP stories and having an overall view of the project held as an interaction diagram (often called a storyboard) and backed up by an object model that describes the problem domain.

Anyway, when I mentioned this to Richard Watt and Martin Fowler of Thoughtworks they suggested that I take a look at a book due out soon called Domain Driven Design, Tackling Complexity in The Heart of Software by Eric Evans which talks about a very similar concept.

What a wonderfully eclectic group we are! It is clear that we all bring many different levels of ability and many different experiences to the mix here. While this is the lifeblood of any organisation it can have a damaging side-effect. If people are not self-aware and self-evaluating there is a real risk that the same things that have been done before keep getting done again and again, regardless of their suitability.