Interview With The ‘I Drink Your Milkshake’ Snorg Tees Girl
Well, the internet definitely works in case anyone was wondering. A few months ago I wrote a post about snorg tees girls, the idea was to let the internet and social media find some snorg tees models for me so I could interview them. The post didn’t go popular on any social media (although it seems to be doing well on Google now :)), so I pretty much gave up on my idea and moved on. But, the web works in mysterious ways and a few months after the post went live I was able to get in touch with Tara (I won’t bore you with the details) who was one of the 5 girls in my original post (#4 to be precise). She was nice enough to agree to do an interview with me.
Of course being a bit burnt out on blogging (and really slack) I didn’t post the interview for ages, but eventually I decided to write it up and so here it is, my interview with the ‘I Drink Your Milkshake’ snorg tees girl.
The Current State Of The Agile Nation - Agile Process Adoption
A few days ago I was asked where I thought Agile adoption was at right now. After giving a long and no-doubt confusing answer I thought I would write it up as well. After all if I had to confuse one person I might as well confuse and bore a whole lot of others while I am at it. Therefore, here is where I think the agile world is right now (oh and by the way, the adoption rates below are my own opinion and are based purely on keeping a ‘finger on the pulse’ not any statistical evidence):
The SCRUM People
Scrum is by far the most well known and widely adopted process right now. Scrum is becoming almost synonymous with agile with some of the biggest names (Ken Schwaber, Jeff Sutherland etc.) in the agile world pushing scrum as their process of choice. Scrum is one of the few agile process that has a certification path (as offered by the Scrum Alliance) and this is probably one of the main reasons why Scrum has become the most widely accepted agile process. Of course the fact that Scrum bundles the majority of XP practices into itself probably doesn’t hurt it much either, infact Scrum couldn’t exist without XP practices.
12 Days Of GEEK Christmas
On the first day of Christmas,
a Klingon sent to me
An 8 Gig USB key.
On the second day of Christmas,
a Goa’uld sent to me
2 ipods playing,
And a brand new Nintendo Wii.
On the third day of Christmas,
a Vulcan sent to me
3 apps compiling,
2 ipods playing,
And a copy of Windows XP.
On the fourth day of Christmas,
a Jaffa sent to me
4 torrents seeding,
3 apps compiling,
2 ipods playing,
And “The Matrix” trilogy on DVD.
On the fifth day of Christmas,
an Ewok sent to me
5 iphones ringing,
4 torrents seeding,
3 apps compiling,
2 ipods playing,
And a Computer Science PHD.
Are You Actually A Post-Agilist?
Have you heard that term? I happened upon it purely by accident about a year ago and after reading and learning a bit about it I found that I could identify with it quite a bit. You can read Jason Gorman’s post Post-Agilism Explained (Pretentiously) as well as Jonathan Kohl’s massive post - Post-Agilism Frequently Asked Questions for a great discussion of what the post-Agile movement is all about. Jonathan and Jason independently coined the term at about the same time so they are an authority on the term if anyone is. I am going to attempt to give my humble views on the topic and hopefully you will identify with some of what I say.
For those of you who’ve decided to learn about post-Agilism after they finish reading this post (thanks!), post-Agilism is basically a movement in the software development community of people who see themselves as moving beyond Agile methods. They have used Agile and not-so-agile methodologies and have moved beyond both to using an amalgamation of tools and methods that best facilitate them doing their job. Post-Agilism is not about evangelizing a particular process or a set of practices or even the Agile Manifesto, it is about getting to the core of the issues that process in general tries to address and solving them in the best ways possible. At least, this is the way I see it.
How NOT To Run A Social Community - Subject Digg
Photo by luisar
When I first started my blog a few months ago, I leaned very quickly (as I am sure many people have before me) that social media was a great way to give a new blog some much needed exposure. Digg, being the undisputed social media leader (at least as far as traffic is concerned), was therefore the natural choice for me to get involved in. It was perhaps a selfish reason to join the community, but that was how I got my first taste of social media.
How To Save Money As A Student
My university days are not that far behind me, so before I grow fat off my software developer’s salary (fat chance! – pun intended) and forget what it was like, I though I’d write down some eminently practical advice on how to be more money conscious as a student.
None of this is going to be mind blowing stuff, I am not going to tell you how to make millions so you don’t have to worry about money. Oh alright I will, all you need to do is write the next big social media application and “wham bam thank you ma’am” you’re on easy street. For those of us back on Earth however, I’ll just try to give some tips on how you can hopefully save money and go from being perpetually out of cash to being perpetually low on it (let’s face it there is no tip I can give that will make you perpetually loaded with cash as a student, unless that social media thing works out for you). I am also going to try and make these tips fun unlike some other articles such as this one or this one, which are great but less fun.
Are You Using The Full Power Of Spring When Injecting Your Dependencies?
If you’re a serious Java (or possibly even .NET) developer you’ve most likely used the Spring Framework before for all you dependency injection needs. You therefore probably know that there are 2 common ways to inject dependencies into your spring beans:
- setter injection
- constructor injection
But, did you know that there is a lot more to it than that? Spring has some extremely powerful capabilities that allow you to do a lot more than just call constructors and setters when creating Spring beans and injecting dependencies.
I am going to attempt to show you some ways that will allow you to create spring beans and inject dependencies in all sorts of different ways, which should let you get a lot more out of using Spring. If you’re a Spring guru then you probably won’t get anything new out of this, however everyone else should hopefully learn something new and become a much more versatile Spring developer.
Here Are Some Words That Rhyme With Orange!
You thought that it was impossible right? Everybody knows that there aren’t any words in the English language that rhyme with orange. Well, everybody is wrong! Here is a whole list full of words that rhyme with orange perfectly. I also included the meaning of every word since you may be hard pressed to find them in the dictionary, unless I miss my guess.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
7 Characters That Could Replace Wesley Crusher On Star Trek And We Wouldn’t Notice The Difference
I’ve been watching the first and second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation lately (yeah, yeah shut up everyone, so I like Star Trek, just get over it :)). Anyways, aside from all the happy memories of years past, watching it reminded me just how completely annoying Wesley Crusher was. Yeah, he was smart and all, but how sickeningly sweet can you possibly get?
So in one of my trademark leaps of logic I started thinking about some other characters from movies and shows that either annoyed me, made me cringe at their total sweetness or made me say “Yeah right!” at the unlikelihood of the stuff they accomplished. I came up with seven and I am thinking we could seamlessly swap these character with Wesley and both shows would hardly notice the difference.
This guy must be kidding, I hear you say. Nope he is deadly serious, that’s right, serious like a fox! Here is the list:
What’s Your Team Building Budget? - Creating and Recognising Team Building Opportunities
Original image courtesy of http://www.mainevents.co.uk
It sometimes amazes me how much emphasis the corporate world places on teamwork without actively doing anything about facilitating the team forming process. Teams are often expected to form “naturally”, because surely if a bunch of random people are thrown together they are bound to start cooperating effectively eventually, right? In million dollar projects, the amount of money allocated to team building is effectively zero, the attitude seems to be – “team building require budget, that’s unpossible!” – and that’s when team building is even on the agenda.
On the other end of the scale, it also sometimes amazes me how overly concerned with facilitating team building the corporate world seems to be. Huge budgets are allocated to various activities for the sole purpose of possibly creating a better team. Awkward corporate retreats, contrived team building activities, hokey trust exercises those are all a staple of the team building junky and no amount of money is too large to get more of that kind of stuff happening.