Right after I mildly complained about the lack of thoughtful orientation on a new job, I was pleasantly surpirsed with this lovely schedule for my first week at the new place. Just wanted to share that with you. There's hope for our world.

Nothing like a long 3-day weekend to help forgetting about the old problems from your previous job. This should help making room for the upcoming avalanche of new information and ramping up on the new gig. Show me where the North is I'm also taking this short interval to revisit my previous experiences...

Consulting engagements are supposed to end, even after 4.5 years. So, yes, my current assignment with the client is scheduled to end this week (is this job change season?). I didn't honestly expect it to last that long when I started but I guess the balance is positive. With the end of the assignment...

The second half of the meeting was an open discussion that revolved around practices of Agile teams. There's also an entertaining rant by I'm-still-Brad in the middle.

This video was captured at the Chicago ALT.NET August 13th meeting . This first video is the Cruise presentation.

Update: The videos of the presentation and discussion have been posted. This month's Chicago ALT.NET meeting was pretty awesome and it was all caught in video. As soon as I have some time to do some post-production on the raw material (read, just stitch pieces together) I'll make it available...

Today I was having another round of conversations with a buddy of mine about the concept of waste and unused code. In agile there is a concept called YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It) that basically states that you should not add code that is not immediately needed as it is waste. In Lean software...

As you may have heard, ThoughtWorks , home of CruiseControl.net, has just released Cruise , their commercial product for CI and beyond. As soon as we heard that news we immediately thought: It would be great if we had someone from TW give us the scoop on that product — especially considering that...

by: Grant Palin This post was originally submitted to The Great Devlicio.us Giveaway . Up until about a year ago, I was programming in .NET using just Visual Studio. I was used to the tedium of manually compiling, testing, backing up projects, writing documentation, and so on. There was no awareness...

I'm about to configure a new development machine this week. It's going to be my 3rd install from scratch in the last 12 months, which I know is not all that much, but certainly more than I wish I had to. Besides the common software development tools, like Visual Studio, SQL Server, Ruby, Office...