Rediscovering the Obvious

Learning from Fast Food

2008-10-23T18:54:00Z

Chipotle has the fastest service of any fast food vendor I go to. Rush hour, takes five minutes max. Go in when they're nearly empty and I can be out in under a minute. Feels faster than the best McDonald's times, even if it's not really. Why is this?

Chipotle does Kanban!

Why do I say this?

Their customer-facing staff are all generalists. They know how to work the register, make all the types of food, and warn the guys behind them when more supplies are needed.

They have a WIP limit of one order per person working the line. The cash register has its own WIP limit of one, or possibly two during the lunch rush.

Customers are the users, the food is the feature. The employees don't write requirements, they ask you just enough about what you want to satisfy the current stage of development.

The first employee pulls an order from the input queue, which is the line of waiting customers.

That employees take the order through the stages until there's another, non-busy employee next to them, then hand it off. There is no knowledge transfer, because there are no requirements beyond what's already piled on your burrito.

The first employee returns to pull the next customer, while the second employee works with the customer for beans, salsa, cheese, and so on, possibly allowing the next employee down the line to pull the customer's order forward.

At full employee capacity, there is one employee filling each stage and the customers move at a steady shuffle down the line. If there is no need for full capacity, then employees can clean tables, the kitchen etc while a smaller number of employees runs the food line.

At lower employee utilization, better (i.e. faster) employees are able to cover more stages, and are not limited in their performance by the process.

They do Kaizen events whenever something is screwed up. The employee will stop the line, solicit assistance from the adjacent employees or the kitchen as needed, and fix the problem. Work doesn't flow around in most cases because things are fixed very quickly and quietly.

Let's look at the key indicators:

They have work tokens (Customers) that utilize single piece flow (the order) and managed through WIP limits (Set dynamically by the resource count).

Resources pull work from station to station, avoiding all queuing for work in progress. (Technically, one order does queue before the cash registers most times)

They stop the line and resolve problems rather than allowing inventory to accumulate.

They have subordinated all other functions to the goal of minimizing customer lead time.

Higher Education and Software Development: Following parallel paths

2008-10-20T16:56:00Z

I’m typing this in the car on my way to Ohio to see the in-laws because I just finished having an incredibly compelling discussion with my wife. My wife is an educator and has a masters of education specialized in adult online learning with a minor in curriculum design. We were discussing her frustration with some of the course authors and facilitators she works with regularly and transitioned to a discussion of how modern education as a whole interacts with online learning and online degrees. I’m going to describe a bit of recent educational history below. Please read this with the history of Agile, Scrum, and the current evolution of Kanban approaches in mind. Please keep in mind that I am intentionally disregarding correspondence schools going back into the 1800’s, although I could easily draw parallels there, too.

Online learning has spent the last two decades working very hard to become an accepted mainstream approach. Initially, online learning was used for niche training, and then degree programs began to become available from a variety of small schools. A huge variety of approaches were tried throughout the 90’s, with the good ones sticking and the bad ones quickly being forgotten. In the late 90’s and into the early 00’s, the industry started to consolidate with regard to the approaches and mechanisms used to deliver the learning, as well as the formats that were adopted for structuring the curriculum themselves.

Sound like the early agile movement? I find it interesting that there are summarization books that collect the successful approaches for online learning, just like Highsmith’s “Agile Software Development Ecosystems” does for agile.

Now, with University of Phoenix having led the charge and defined a highly effective “How” and then proven that it can be scaled very profitably, there are a huge number of small schools starting to get involved with their own programs. Additionally, the big, traditional universities are taking notice of what’s happening and introducing their own online degree programs. However, not only are the big schools years behind, they have a number of difficulties trying to integrate this “new reality” with the large-school mindset held by their administrations and tenured faculty.

I believe that sounds quite a bit like Scrum. It’s become the de facto “way to do Agile”, and it’s a very good one. My wife’s Master’s degree is from UOPHX, and I believe Scrum is vastly improved over traditional methods, so I don’t mean this as a slam. The big universities fit well with the issues faced by large companies trying to move towards agility.

The next wave is happening now. Back to where I started this discussion, my wife was chatting about a survey of “Authentic Learning” performed by her boss. This is where she sees the industry going next, and she’s certainly applying the principles and practices of authentic learning to her work, even before these principles and practices have accepted names or approaches. The essence of authentic learning is in moving away from students “learning how to be students” and towards “learning how to learn”. As an isolated example, authentic learning stresses challenging students with problems that have many possible solutions, rather than “traditional” problems with a single, gradable answer. By the way, "authentic learning" is new the same way agile is new. People have done it for a long time, but it's hard, and takes work, so people don't do it out of laziness or lack of discipline.

This is where I see Kanban fitting it. It’s not the answer, but it’s a positive move in the right direction, and it serves to move beyond the status quo towards a meaningful improvement. Even better, not only does it stress individually fitting solutions for the problems faced in development, it includes the Kaizen improvement culture for Just In Time improvements to the process. As an aside, I see Kaizen as being superior to the retrospective approach used in Scrum because it is event driven (pull) instead of periodic (push).

Now, we’ve done a great job pulling in many lessons from manufacturing to use in improving our software development process. So many, in fact, that manufacturing is becoming a very common metaphor, possibly even more common than the previous metaphor of home construction. Guess what? We’ve hit another single-metaphor system, and we’re driving straight towards stagnation again. I believe that now is the time to begin pulling in more metaphors, ideally those built on proven models. Education, with its many learning models, has a lot to teach us. Science, with its well defined methods for belief and proof, has a lot to teach us. Architecture has taught us patterns, and only recently have people really applied those to processes. I think we can learn quite a bit from service industries. Chipotle runs a very effective Kanban process for burrito building, for example. Economics had a great deal to teach us in managing incentives. The military could teach us a lot about specialized training, and about layered planning and delegation, and about utilization of specializations in a generalist environment, and about drastically changing the intent and behavior of a large force in a short period. There are a nearly infinite number of sermons out there that could be applied in various places. Traffic management could teach us [more] about avoiding bottlenecks. Some of these have been done already, some need to be done more, some might be brand new. I don’t care, so long as the knowledge comes to us!

Summary: Go forth, find guidance and wisdom from other disciplines, bring it back. And share it.

The power of assumptions

2008-10-17T16:02:00Z

I was a band member once upon a time. In middle school, I played French Horn for four years. Then, I didn't pick it back up for over 15 years until last December when my lovely wife gave me a wonderfully shiny silver French Horn for our five year anniversary, with the encouragement to start learning. I toyed with it on and off, remembering the fingerings from muscle memory and really getting into playing the basic songs in the books she bought me. However, I continually got discouraged because I was quite simply unable to hold a tune; the pitch of most every note was off by at least a half step, often a full step. I lived with this, and slowly got discouraged and the horn started gathering dust until a couple nights ago when we decided to try playing a duet with my wife on the baby grand.

"Let's just play some scales, maybe that'll help you find the pitch" C Major, here we come! C... sounds great! D... hmmm... E... that's off... and so on... right up the scale... only C and A seemed to be hitting consistently. After a while, I got frustrated, asked her to hold a note, and tried different fingerings until I got one to match the pitch. WTF? Why is this a 2-3 when I'm used to playing it as a 0?

Then came the dawning realization that banished my ignorance, my assumptions, and the sum total of my muscle memory. This wasn't the same horn! There are two types of French Horns - Bb and F. I grew up playing an F horn, this apparently was a Bb horn. So I got out a pencil, copied the Bb fingerings from my fingering chart onto the music, and started playing (very very slowly). Instant pitch! My problem wasn't a 15-year-old embouchure as I'd assumed for the last year, it was a disconnect of my core knowledge!

I should have remembered what I knew. Heck, I even read all about it in David Agans' book! FIGURE OUT THE PROBLEM BEFORE FIXING IT! Doh!

Silverlight 2 RTW, or, how Microsoft choked

2008-10-14T17:45:00Z

First, I'll repeat the news that's all over: Microsoft has released the "final" version of Silverlight 2.0 to the world! This is a major step for .NET developers, because it means we can do really incredible things on the web without massive injections of AJAX or having to learn Flash. For example, take a look at what we've done with Inkubook. However, there is a lot to be said about how Microsoft approached things.

I believe that until Friday, October 10th, Microsoft has led nearly a perfect game with regards to how they've managed Silverlight. Here's my perspective of what they did until now:

Released a very minimal 1.0 edition that solved a small number of challenging problems in an elegant way.
Very clearly communicated the known limitations of 1.0 while sharing plans for 2.0 as they became available.
Released a very early build of 2.0 that generally did not break exiting 1.0 applications.
Refreshed 2.0 with new released several times, clearly communicating both where the changes were likely to occur, and then what was broken as a result of earlier work.
Successfully supported the Olympic Games with a Beta product with very few issues.
Repeatedly engaged the community with what's going on throughout the process, with many Microsoft developers and program managers sharing the work in progress and building training material on their blogs.
Taking the unprecedented step of releasing an RC0 a short time before the release of a web-based product would break many developers application. They told the community that we'd have a short notice before they released the real final version, but they wanted us to have a chance to get everything updated ahead of time.

Fourth Quarter, two minute warning, Microsoft up by a touchdown with the ball and all their timeouts remaining.

Can anybody out there please tell me what possessed Microsoft to change the game plan this close to the end? Here's what (to my perspective) happened:

Friday, Oct 10, Microsoft announces a conference call for Monday the 13th through their PressPass site (http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2008/oct08/10-10GuthrieSilverlightMA.mspx).
Apparently, they also communicated a gag order internally, because nobody inside Microsoft blogged about Silverlight over that entire weekend with the exception of Jessie Liberty's ongoing Silverlight daily tutorials.
As a result, many teams probably missed this call entirely. We were only aware of it through the vigilance of one developer... on a team where everybody tries to follow blogs and keep up on the tech we're using day in and day out.
During the call (Monday, noon EST), Scott announces that Microsoft will be releasing Silverlight to the web "Tomorrow morning", with no more detail. Note that he essentially just said that "Sometime in the next 12-24 hours we will be turning off your web site unless you're ready.
After the call (Monday, 1pm EST) we go into scramble mode, refreshing the prototype branch where we characterized the fixes to the breaking changes, merging it into our mainline build, and throwing the entire team at "making it work". Please note that this meant that means that most of our developers needed to install VS SP1 (1-2 hours), uninstall and reinstall the silverlight developer tools, runtime, and Blend (1-2 hours)... prior to this, we had one machine capable of building our site in RC0.
Microsoft makes an updated breaking changes list available. This list includes a half-dozen new items. This list does NOT include a number of items that have been commented on public blogs between the publication of the two lists. There are a number of breaking changes that have affected me that are not on any list. (Examples: Negative border widths no longer valid in styles, changes to when ActualWidth is set relative to first Measure pass, introduced need to explicitly call ApplyTemplate in some cases)
That afternoon (Monday, 3pm EST) through evening (Monday, 11pm EST) we flew through our code base... first, commenting out or deleting the bits that didn't work, then slowly fixing them back in once we got a baseline working.
The first posts about it start coming out, and most of them aren't from MS employees (Monday, ~4pm EST)
We put in place plans to put the site into maintenance mode as soon as we see evidence of the RTW,
We go home (Monday, 11pm EST), planning on cleaning up further graphical glitches in the morning.

Now, you notice that this has a fairly happy ending, for which we're entirely grateful and I give full credit to my team for accomplishing this in less than 12 hours... even the new dev that just started yesterday stayed till 7pm and made meaningful contributions. This doesn't change my opinion of how Microsoft bungled this release.

I have personally lost a lot of trust in how Microsoft will support products on their Go-Live licenses. They've earned a lot over the last couple of years, but much of it was burnt today. I still don't know when they will flip the switch and turn on automatic updates to existing clients... which greatly impacts our release plans over the next week or so. At this point, I think I'm going to stop, and end with a few specific steps that Microsoft could have taken that would have saved my trust.

Announce the plans to the world on Friday when they were clearly already set. If there was still a chance of calling it off, tell us that, so we can plan accordingly.
Provide a specific forum to discuss the logistics with the community. Silverlight.net would be a great place for this. Who knows, maybe the community could suggest things to make it go more smoothly all around.
Specify a single, authoritative place (blog, forum, web page, whatever) where we can get up-to-the-minute status of what's happing... is the RTW out there, is it available, etc?

Summary: Communicate - don't shut down at the most critical moment.

[EDIT]

I very much appreciate the quick reaction from Tim Heuer at Microsoft. After exchanging a number of emails with him last night, I want to clarify a wee bit:

I am VERY IMPRESSED with how Microsoft communicated leading up to this release, right up until Friday of last week.
I am VERY IMPRESSED with the work produced by the Microsoft developers at a technical level.
I am VERY IMPRESSED with the road map that's been shared and followed.
I am VERY IMPRESSED with the efforts extended by most contact points to "make things right", especially Midwest architect evangelist Larry Clarkin.

However, I still have a core set of issues, which are summarized below:

Key issue: No warning was given of when and where the announcement would take place. ScottGu didn't even post on his own blog that he'd be making an announcement at 9am Monday.
Key issue: The information followed a different path than all other announcements did previously.
Key issue: The original announcement said it would be short, possibly very short notice. I don't think many people understood that meant "same day notice"
Key issue: Monday's announcement said "we'll release this tomorrow morning". Nobody clarified a) What time (i.e. 11pm PST?) or b) that automatic update would/would not be turned on out of the box.

Three things

2008-10-04T21:50:59Z

Trust
Value
Integrity

These three things are what I find to be the three critical aspects of all of the professional (and personal) relationships I share.

Trust, for me, is continually completing the things I say I will do. Trust is easily built by committing to a small item, then successfully providing that small item. On the other hand, trust cannot be achieved by being told what to do and then doing it. I'll keep Kanban mostly out of this post, but this an aspect of why pull works. Trust can be lost, but it can also be regained, and even very low-trust relationships can be successfully transformed through the relentless pursuit of improvement.

Value is key, in business. Every relationship and communication carries transaction costs and coordination costs. Within the context of the responsibility your trust has permitted you, each individual must strive to provide maximal value to those around them. In exchange, that value will be returned, possibly multiplied. Perceived value is the down-payment on a relationship, delivered value is the rent. Words can create a relationship, but only actions can sustain it. Otherwise, casual (low cost) relationships will slowly wither, one-sided relationships will wither quickly with one person being frustrated, and painful (high-cost) relationships will be terminated. Often, the processes of gaining trust and delivering value are tightly related. However, value is very time-sensitive (here comes real options), while trust suffers only from the slow effects of entropy. This is how long-term partnerships are built across many short engagements.

Integrity is the cornerstone of all of these. Integrity is ethics, morals, and much more. Of these three topics, integrity is the only one that starts full, and it's the hardest to refill when it's been lost. Integrity can be lost, and it can be made visible to others. Occasionally, in exceptional circumstances, it can be regained. Integrity means that you stand up for what you believe, for the rights of others, and for just the "right thing". It means you admit your failures, and acknowledge the need to rebuild trust and value in the face of difficulties. It means you acknowledge and respect the trust and value offered by others, abstaining from activities that knowingly hurt others. Oh, and the other thing, integrity doesn't count when it's easy, you only get points for it when it's hard. Integrity is advising a competitor of a potential leak or security risk, rather than unethically using those errors. Integrity is accepting the fault for the entire project failing, and then doing something about it. Integrity is refusing to let the general apathy rule the day.

These three things are critical to myself, and to any enterprise with which I am associated. As my personal and professional networks expand I am also recognizing that each of these things has a network effect as well. The more people with whom I have engendered trust, the more default trust I seem to have from their trusted peers. This was especially visible at Agile2008. It was my first entry into the Agile world directly, but the trust and value exchanges with people at the APLN Summit two weeks before somehow gave me direct access into the speaker circle, and as a result I spent much of the conference learning (and hopefully helping others learn) with the most respected individuals there. What's more interesting, is that I can trace the chain of connections back to a single lunch I shared in Chicago during 2005. That chain could have been broken at any time by a failure on any of the three items above.

Today, I played designer

2008-09-30T16:33:00Z

It was rather nice. For a few minutes earlier today, I was able to experience the designer's perspective of Blend. We had a bug filed on one of our common controls' visual appearance, and a designer and a developer were pairing on cleaning it up. They asked me how to structure something, and I was able to completely restructure the UI model of that component without making a single functional change. Yay for Expression Blend living up to one of its promises. Next step is to figure out how to make the experience more common, and help bring the silos closer together... let's make multi-grain! (err, that was really dumb, but once typed, it was hard to delete)

More thoughts on overtime

2008-09-24T17:22:00Z

Every few months something triggers a series of thoughts in my head about overtime practices, behaviours, and incentives. Every time I think about it, my thoughts come back to a question of the relative incentives in the way our software development system. On many teams, the management group has the authority, while the developers have the ultimate power. The people with the authority have an easy answer: demanding overtime is a no-lose situation until the developers quit out of frustration. The developers, on the other hand, have two options: do the overtime, or quit. There is no incremental pain to the management team, while the developers suffer all of the incremental pain.

How do we fix this?

Neither extreme seems appropriate. There really are circumstances in every business where overtime should be required, because the value to be gained exceeds the costs inherent to the overtime. When there is little or no incremental cost to management, the value will always exceed it. Thus, maybe the question becomes "How do we set a meaningful cost of overtime?" A few options could involve paying out overtime (direct financial cost), comp time (borrowing time), or even trading overtime for allowing developers to choose a week's worth of internal improvement work (options/control cost). (This third option is exciting to teams that want to produce better code but have been in "rush to release" mode for too long).

There is no general solution, I fear. Any solution needs to account for the personal situations of the developers and the project.

One thing I do know for sure: there is much less bitterness when the managers are in the building on the weekends too. There was one time on our last overtime drive when there were three levels of managers (the last of which reports directly to the CEO) there on a Saturday, just to support the developers and make sure nothing was blocking.

Mr. Sowell goes to software.

2008-08-22T16:56:00Z

There is no need to attempt to determine the net effect of cities on costs in general. First of all, there is no such thing as costs in general. There are particular costs that matter differently to particular individuals and enterprises, and those individuals and enterprises can weigh for themselves the various costs and benefits that affect them. The assumption that third-party observers can make better decisions than the people directly involved has produced many urban fallacies and many economic and social disasters. The belief that third parties with no stake in the outcome are empowered, morally as well as politically, to override the decisions of those who do have a stake in the outcome has been institutionalized in 'city planning' studies at universities, in 'smart growth' laws and policies, and in various crusading movements to stop 'urban sprawl' or to cure neighborhood 'blight' - as third parties choose to define these terms.

I came across this quote by Mr. Sowell (page 39) in the course of my normal reading, and it seems to follow with what I currently see happing in the Agile community. One of the overriding feelings I have after Agile 2008 is that many people believe "Agile == Scrum". Since I've never done a full implementation of Scrum/XP, it's hard to say (I'll cover my path somewhere else). But, to the point.

Reread Sowell's paragraph again, only replace "cities" with "processes", replace "urban" with "project", and then drop various agile methodoligies in for "city planning" and "smart growth" and various "bad project smells" in for "urban sprawl" and "blight". what do you get?

Think about it. This is what agile set out to fix, but now it is what agile as become. Instead of "too much documentation" and "analysis paralysis", we've got "fixed length iterations" and "Test first". Are we condemned to always put bandaids over what we've got? We know that it is much harder to take away a process than to add it in most cases, and this matches well with what Sowell sees about property laws and regulations. It is good that our community continues to learn, and continues to evolve, but we must focus on allowing that evolution to take its course wherever it may go. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of holding certain tenets sacred. These tenets slide their way into the core of our culture, and become very hard to excise. They're everywhere, and they're taken for granted in many cases. Things like "The CMMi is too heavy, and useless" and "Waterfall is innately bad". Invididuals may question these tenets, but changing that opinion in the community is a challenge that may go nowhere.

What's next? How do we prevent ourselves from falling down? How do we prevent the concept of agility from being tied down by the paradigm of Agile? Or, as has been talked about before, how do we avoid the need for a post-agile movement? There's effort in this direction, but it is also has the potential to become a major holy war.

This post is all over the place, which nicely matches where my brain is going as I think about this, but the core lession I've learned about this today is that I have another domain I can use to inspire improvement in the software community. The problems are all the same, and everybody else has solved them for us. Let us lead this community, a community devoted to learning, out to other fields of knowledge and find those people who have solved our problems before. Look in the learning of the building architects, the city planners, the economists, the mechanical and civil engineers... all of these long-established disciplines that have a history of running [mostly] successful projects. We've leaned from Manufacturing, but where else can we look?

References:

Sowell, Thomas. (2008). Economic facts and fallacies. Basic Books, Cambridge MA.

Back from Agile2008!

2008-08-12T17:11:00Z

Wow, so much I probably should talk about, but I don't even know where to start. Massive amounts of networking, information, realization, and even contribution going on, and I can't unravel it at all right now. I think there's a lot of potential for transforming this into real, meaningful changes in my current environment, but I need to be cautious in how I approach things. I firmly believe in a few core changes that I think will drastically amplify the performance of our extended development group, but I can't just say "we need to do this"... I need to inspire people to _want_ an understanding of how it will help, and then I can happily and easily teach the basis of pull-based, work-limited techniques and explain what changes I expect to see appearing.

In other news, I had a great lunch with Chris S. today and am very excited to hear about the connections he made at the conference. He has a great opportunity to become a leader in the emerging area of Real Options within the Agile community and could extend both his personal brand and his current company's brand though developing those opportunities. Chris, go for it!

Finally, my brain's operating at a process level, and this post is hopefully a means to allow me to dump some of those thoughts and focus back on the code I need to write today. Maybe I shouldn't have started out touching the part of the system where the changes HAVE to be right, since it's the core factory of an entire tier.

30 days later

2008-07-25T14:39:00Z

Wow - it's been over thirty days since my last post. What's changed since then?

First, we've put http://inkubook.com into production. I'm very proud of the work I've done and that my team has done on this one. We killed ourselves getting it done, but this is the product of just six months of work of the team. We took a new technology, started coding against Silverlight 1.0 and had a working version of the book editor functioning with the ability to print books by March 31, then we dug right back in and built out the same capability in Silverlight 2 Beta 1. This was some of the most fun I've had as a developer, ever. We reached functional parity and more in about two months, then added a few key feature areas around photo manipulation and text handling as well as making the entire thing look a LOT better than it did.

Second, I went to Seattle to the APLN Summit and learned an incredible amount from the people I met there. The speaker list was stellar, and the format was incredibly useful for getting professionals to interact with the experts on a variety of topics. Lots of pictures up on Flickr.

Third, at a personal level I've been doing a lot of refocusing on what's important in my life. I've dropped some of my weekly commitments and will continue to do so. I've made a commitment to spend more time at home in the evenings. I've started making an improved effort to reconnect with my peers from various engagements and spend time over beer chatting about technology. I'm refocusing on learning, because I've allowed my focus to drift too far towards execution.

And a subtle shift scrumward

2008-06-20T18:37:00Z

Our team has decided to take a step back towards scrum and away from our previous semi-Kanban approach. I think that it's a good plan at this time, although I also suspect that many of the benefits of our earlier approach will continue to show through.

Why did we do this? Here's some of my thoughts. They do not at all reflect the thoughts of anybody else on my team or in my company.

We were unable to fully realize the benefits of Kanban. For example, we had a visual mapping of our value stream, but we never made the transition to using that visualization to improve how the team communicates within itself or to the outside.
We lacked the process maturity to accurately forecast release dates for specific features based on lead times and SLA. I believe this was in large part due to the ongoing issues we've had with controlling batch size (both too large and inconsistently sized). I think we'll be able to better do this in the future, but the current failures did not go a long way to building trust in our approaches with stakeholders.
We had early success with Scrum before we changed product targets. Scrum has been highly effective for our management team in planning features at a high level. I believe that ordering and allowing the dev group to choose the amount of focus on each one would be more productive overall; however, we've had issues in determining a good order, and we've struggled to structure a good focus across roles within the group.

I anticipate that our "outward facing" status and planning will be Sprint-based, while our internal approach will remain somewhat Kanban. The sprint backlog will serve as our feeding buffer, while we'll manage how much work we allow to be active amongst the team during a sprint the same way that we are now. The biggest difference is that our in-process lead time is artificially fixed at 30 days and our overall response time to external requests will average around 45 days.

Career progression

2008-06-15T16:12:00Z

In the beginning, there is no resume, only an application.
Then, there is the resume.
Later, the resume becomes an afterthought, used to round out the paperwork.
Until, eventually, there is no resume, only trust.

Software Development Meme

2008-06-14T14:27:00Z

Thanks Dan, I don't have time for this, but you went and called me out.

Here is the trace of how this request eventually got to me:

Michael Eaton (post) -> Sarah Dutkiewicz (post) -> Jeff Blankenburg (post) -> Josh Holmes (post) –> Larry Clarkin (post) –> Dan Rigsby (Post) -> me

1. How old were you when you started programming?
I was a bit of a late bloomer. Other than playing around with Commodore BASIC and Q-Basic when I was five, I probably didn't do any "real" programming until I was in college.

2. How did you get started in programming?
I graduated college, arrived for my first day on the job for Embedded development, and was handed this big book on COM to go with the C++ I had already learned in college. I never did get to do any hardware work.

3. What was your first language?
Commodore BASIC when I was a wee one, then C++/ATL/WTL for the real world

4. What was the first real program you wrote?
I wrote a C++ program for a local company during my first summer off school. It modeled heat flow dynamics in a washing machine. I'm still not entirely sure WHY they wrote it, since it didn't seem to match the stated goals of the program, but it was the result of multiple generations of interns working away at it.

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?
BASIC, C++, C#, Java, VB, VB.NET, and unofficially, BF.

6. What was your first professional programming gig?
An intern after my first year of college. After that, I went to SEP, Inc. right out of school and stayed there for seven years.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?
I think I would have. I probably would have planned ahead a bit more on how I'd integrate other aspects than just coding, but definitely would write code.

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Read. Write. Share. Talk.
Essentially, see Dan's, because he pretty much nailed it. It all comes down to partaking of the experience of others so you don't have to make the same mistakes.

9. What’s the most fun you’ve ever had … programming?
Honestly, it's been this last push where I've been able to take a brand new technology and bend it to my will, producing a VERY sexy consumer app in the process.

10. Who are you calling out?

Sorry, the line stops here, otherwise I'd have to call out my team, and they're all WAY to busy.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 - Breaking changes

2008-06-11T17:18:00Z

Lots of little things with various results. The breaking changes list got me through 99% of them, here's some of the others, and I'll probably update now and then with more.

1 - Image.Source property. Before, I could use this to find out if I've already initialized an image (in a hover-popup in this case). Now, it returns a valid BitmapImage, even if it's empty. Good, but not what I expected and it failed silently until I realized my previews weren't showing.

if ( PreviewImage.Source == null )
{

....
}
2 - ActualHeight and ActualWidth seem to be getting set later in the first layout pass than they were before. This led to some issues in setting a ScaleTransform during the first layout pass.

Thoughts on Batch Size

2008-06-03T22:29:00Z

The concepts surrounding batch size have been floating around my head again in recent days. My current assignment is a rather large batch of work with Silverlight 2.0, but it's one that I've been able to subdivide into a number of small batches that rapidly build on each other. Thus, each one of my check ins to my private branch are able to show continual improvement in what I've made available. Unfortunately, from a throughput perspective, the value of this is exactly _zero_. Why? Because until Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2 is released, we don't have a GoLive license from Microsoft. Thus, this environmental constraint has forced me into a situation where I have a very large batch that can't be released until a specific point.

What does this mean? For starters, it means that our board has a VERY large balloon of work in the middle, and that overall we have near-zero flow. Our work in progress is artificially limited to three requirements, but the actual size of one of those is 10x the other two.

What are the implications of a large, all or nothing batch of work? Probably 90% of the features within the requirement would apply as MMF's, so they can't really be dropped out. I can't do partial releases due to policy constraints (although, we'll be bending that a bit since it's not RTW). I'm going to think about this, and I'll try to remember to post what comes out of this. For now, I've got more code to write. Mixing methodologies a bit, I should be able to trickle out a couple more inch-pebbles tonight ;)

Inkubook is (briefly) hiring!

2008-05-24T13:39:00Z

Effective _now_, we are hiring a single experienced individual into an architect or senior developer role. If you have a desire to work with an incredible team, have great .NET coding skills, and have a desire to see your work become a real product in the marketplace, contact me ASAP. (eric dot willeke at gmail dot com)

If you already have Silverlight 2.0 or WPF skills, place yourself at the front of the line and contact me ASAP. We are looking at filling this position immediately, potentially as early as Wednesday, so don't delay expressing your interest.

Indy Geek Beer

2008-05-16T20:19:00Z

http://IndyGeekBeer.org

Just a bunch of nerds and geeks gathering at the moon dog to have a couple beers and chat about what's what in the world. Probably [can't be] too much tech, but we'll see ;)

Twitter up!

2008-04-28T16:33:00Z

I've finally been pulled in by the twitter-mass in the Indy dev community (I blame you, Larry). I'm at erwilleke

Speaker's dinner!

2008-04-26T23:22:00Z

I'm sitting at the after-party for today's CodeCamp. I wasn't going to come, but I was asked yesterday if I could speak, so I ran my Branch Management speech for four people (double last time!) that were still around the last session. The good thing is that the people really wanted to hear it if they showed up. Three guys looking to adopt TFS and one that recently had adopted it and had quesitons. So far, so good.. The talk went as well as it did before, but it isn't a "great" subject for conference talks... more of an academic session environment.

Now, I'm sitting at Champps, surrounded by a bunch of other geeks. Everybody was invited, but it turns out that everybody at the table spoke today and almost all of them have technical blogs going. Good gathering for meeting people doing the same stuff as me (or doing better stuff - yay for learning!)

Burger-time... later.

Oh, and Aaron FINALLY shows... still wearing his tag, even.

And now, the issues past, Silverlife is wonderful!

2008-04-18T14:25:00Z

I've managed to get past the random issues that seem to plague me when adopting new technologies, and I'm digging into the meat of Silverlight 2.0 (Beta 1). This is GREAT! Blend is a great tool, and they've made using resources SO MUCH BETTER! The visual studio XAML editor works VERY well. (Intellisense bonuses: clr-namespace tags are descriptive and work well. Event handler creation was so smooth I wasn't sure it was working at first)

Layout went well for the main preview screen, and I'm looking forward to digging into wiring up behavior now. Databinding's not entirely there, yet, but I've got high hopes that it'll smooth out quickly, I only spent a few minutes on it yesterday.

Nasty upgrade bug with .NET 3.5...

2008-04-16T03:13:00Z

or silverlight, or visual studio, or something. Anyway, my work is in the Silverlight.net installation forum under a post titled "Silverlight startup error with resources - Summary of fix"

The corrected file is attached here, and I hate wasting a full day (and some of the evening) on things like this.

[EDIT] the full link of the post is http://silverlight.net/forums/p/14264/46863.aspx#46863. A distributed transaction letting me know what my link would be on both ends BEFORE i published either could have made this a bit easier.

The first time

2008-04-12T19:15:00Z

Thursday, after the main IndyNDA event, I performed my first public presentation. I've presented to teams, classrooms, and my company before, but this is the first time I've had the opportunity to present to an uncontrolled group of my professional peers. It turned out that I only had three people there, but I can't complain since it's very hard to get nervous in front of three people. I think it went well, and I was very happy with my slide deck, pacing, speech, and the quality of questions and answers that came out of it. I'm attempting to attach the final version of the presentation here, so feel free to take a look. If anybody out there's interested in talking more about branch management with team foundation server 2008, by all means get in touch.

My first live blog post... April Indianapolis .NET Developers Association

2008-04-10T22:11:00Z

I've never done this before... I'm sitting in the IndyNDA event for this month, and since there's wireless, and I've got my computer, and IndyNDA's got tables, I thought I'd actually give live posting a try. Expect a stream of thought as I (partially) listen to the presentations.

Tonight's presentation is by Paul Hacker talking about what's in Windows Server 2008 and Dan Rigsby talking about new features in VS 2008. I'm hoping they're going to be going into much more detail than they did at the Heroes Happen {here} event.

Windows Server 2008

Lots of new stuff here, but it's looking like another wave of specialists is needed. I'm interested, but getting it into production is a scary proposition since there are no "experts". Half my team knows what to go in and try to tweak if we've got issues on production [note: this can be bad], which can save the night sometimes. If all the rules have changed, tough... now what? Windows Server Core, clustering, and firewalls do look good, though. "If somebody stole your domain controller"... there are so many things I've never really had to think about.

I like the look of the new admin tool. The current one's a pain. Hypervisor - neat - I'll have to look at this one. Now I know what "System Center" is... kind of...

Aside: Listening to Paul present is somewhat intimidating. He's done this a billion times, and tonight's my first time. Soon after I typed this, he gave me an excellent plug to get people to my presentation afterwards.

SQL Server 2008

Sounds like Dan's going to expand on the launch event with some details: Top 10 SQL Server features (for developers), Visual Studio features for different types of developers. Lots of 'neat' helpers to represent difficult types of data. More time types, more hierarchies, and some spatial/geographic data types. Data Change Tracking would have saved a LOT of effort on several tables for auditing. Modes for "event audit" and mode for "history". Is this something that maintains row-level or just table-level? I'll have to ask! Time type can go out to nanoseconds, but can anything meaningful come out of servers, or only specific applications storing eternal data in that format.

I like the output of the node management and the ability to .ToString() it into a meaningful representation. More interesting is the .NET syntax in the SQL. I'm seeing quite a lot of potential as SQL and (as an example) C# come together. Does VB.NET have a future? I asked if the tracking goes to the row level, but nobody's sure yet. He mentioned a new "Sync" server which reminds me of replication services, but hopefully faster.

I need to remember to set up the Source code symbol server sometime soon, just in case I ever need to climb in (instead of reflecting the linq framework)

He's mentioning the framework versioning targets, but the templates don't work well for generators. Annoying. I forgot about that.

Visual Studio 2008

Less of interest here - I've used most of the features he's going over already, and the new stuff is about manifests, deployment, etc... stuff that's a bit beyond my ken at the moment since I"m living in a server world. He's doing a bit of WPF, but I already put my time in on that (although, I did get a chance to pull the TFSStickyBuddy project down from codeproject and take a look at it. This could be fun if I get to it over the next month at all... maybe in NC next month.. heh - maybe I should try and set up a day trip to the MS office in Raleigh to meet the dev team. Back to focus, though. Dan asked who's using 3.5 currently - maybe a double-handful out of the 100+ in the room.

Ok - Stickybuddy just got a lot less fun... VB.NET... ARGH! Seems well-factored, though... time to dig in. ... and, thus ends my attention span for the presentation...

After a delay, and a bit of heckling of Dan for using Twitter like a high school girl (and Paul, and Larry), it's time for me to get prepped for my presentation.

Linq entities and calling Attach()

2008-04-04T19:58:00Z

Back to tech, for now.

I like Linq to SQL. A LOT. However, there have been a handful of things that have annoyed me, and one of them is the story around serialization and disconnected entities. They've built a nice engine for it (DataContract-based), and really optimized it for the case where you're getting a data set from a disconnected client and storing the changes to the server. Except, annoyingly, there's no good way to tell if an entity is already attached to a specific context. And, you can't call .Attach() on something unless it's currently floating. Did I mention there's no .Detach? The only way I know of for it to be detached is to have just been Deserialized.

Well, we're storing entities across calls. In one case, it's in the session. In another, it's in memcached. Either way, there are cases were we don't know if our object that needs updating to the DB has been loaded fresh during the current call or not. Well, it's not a documented approach, but by looking at the code, I can find out that doing this will work:

// HACK: This will prevent a reattachment by identifying that the
// provided project was already available in this context.
Project originalProject = db.Projects.GetOriginalEntityState(project);
if ( originalProject == null )
{
db.Projects.Attach(project);
}

What would you do with a 12 passenger van?

2008-03-12T20:38:00Z

My wife and I, as instructors and directors at Dan Shi Martial Arts Club, would use it to make a huge difference in the lives of our students. We currently pick up 12 children in inner-city Indianapolis every Saturday, Monday, and Wednesday. For the past five years, we've done this using our two personal vehicles and at least one volunteer driver & vehicle each trip. The visible rewards of adding stability to these children's lives has been amazing. Unfortunately, as the program grows we have been forced to progressively cut back the frequency we pick up certain students. On weekends when one or more of the volunteer drivers are unavailable, we're forced to cancel the ride for many of the kids. The only way we've been able to continue picking up all of the children on Saturdays is through a donor allowing us to use her minivan for four hours every Saturday.

One of the major goals for our program has been to acquire a van to bring these kids to the studio.

This Monday, we discovered that we are able to purchase a business van from a local software engineering company for the very reasonable price of $5300. Insurance and the other logistical details fell quickly into place and fit within the budget. The only problem was buying the van. $5300 represents a great deal of money for an organization with no paid employees using donated space. $5300 represents three tournaments that our students would have to skip. $5300 represents far, far more than Dan Shi's current account balance having just paid for two spring tournaments. So, we reached out to our donors.

By the end of the night Monday, we had $1200 pledged. By the end of Tuesday we were up to $2200.

We expect to have until Monday, March 17th to come up with the money. We've talked to our best donors. They've responded happily and quickly in spite of having just sponsored the spring tournaments. We're still short, and it's time to reach outside our normal community.

How can you help?

If you are able to donate $1000, $500, or even $100 towards helping us to realize this opportunity, you have made a difference in a child's life. You have helped to bring a little bit more light into the lives of children living in one of the poorest areas of Indianapolis. You have helped a child learn the discipline and focus required to make a difference in their own lives. If you will support this effort, contact me as soon as possible: eric.willeke@gmail.com.

What difference will you make?