Low Country Software Ramblings

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.NET

Scott Guthrie talks about lambda expressions which make their debut in Orcas.  Functional programming, here we come!

Career

Adam Goucher describes 3 types of environment he’s experienced at different companies. The environment can definitely be a factor when looking at an employer.
Community

Larry O’Brien has high praise for Acronis TrueImage.  It just saved his bacon, or at least his computer. His diligence in doing daily backups also helped… I also like the way he partitions his drives: OS, bin (Program Files), data, media, and non-backup volatile. How does he get all his programs installed in their own partition?  Sometimes, they just want to be in C:\Program Files…
Brad Abrams has a fun little video of the Visual Studio “Defy all Challenges”.  You get to actually SEE what some of the big names look like.

Scott Hanselman has set a goal to raise $50,000 for Diabetes research.  This is a disease that affects a large segment of the population.  Diabetes is the 6th leading cause of death in the US.  I made a contribution, as my way of giving back to Scott for the great content he has put out for the last 5 years.  Since I only have about 0.25% of his readership,  I would like to contribute that much to his cause.  That’s $125.  Can 5 generous readers contribute $25?

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The consulting market is an interesting place. Essentially, you trade your knowledge and expertise for cash. For the purpose of this discussion, I’ll split the consulting world in two camps: The “independent employee”, and the advice-giver/solution-provider.The independent employee is essentially that. A company needs to beef up resources, and instead of adding employee overhead, they go out and hire someone for a period of time. They pay more hourly, but no benefits. Essentially, you draw a paycheck every so often, regardless of the success of the project, the quality of your deliverables, etc… Yes, they can terminate your contract at any time, but you know what, even if you’re a full fledged employee, you don’t have much better job security. This type of consulting, I have no experience with at all, and that’s not what I’m interested in here.

The advice-giver/solution-provider is where the interesting stuff happens.  In this model, you are engaged to perform something specific.  Either give advice which will be beneficial (this is essentially what lawyers & accountants do) or provide a solution to a specific problem the client is having.

I have a bit of experience as an advice-giver, and my personal philosophy has always been that if I can’t deliver value to the client, or they are not satisfied, then they shouldn’t pay for it.  Joel Spolsky addresses this in point 7 of his seven steps to remarkable customer service. You might hear objections like:

“Customers will take advantage of this to get stuff for free!” - They might, but those are not customers you want. Learn from it and pre-screen your customers.  One of the best piece of advice out there is “Know who you don’t want as customers”.

“I have to get paid for my time!” - You should NOT get paid for your time.  You should get paid for the value you provide!  Big difference. Even as an employee, you should keep sight of the fact that you are remunerated for the value you provide, NOT the time you work per se.  It just happens that most businesses find it easier to track the time and pay for that instead of analyzing the value the employee provides.  Note that sales is the exception…Remuneration is strongly correlated to value provided

Applying this might be difficult in the context of providing a solution.  Often, those are multi-month long projects, with changing requirements (we know all about that don’t we!).  The customer changes his mind all the time, they are never happy with what we deliver, etc..

This is where I believe an Agile approach might have a leg up over a traditional methodology. One of the pillar of Agile is to provide value, all the time.  Have frequent delivery of incremental functionality.  Demonstrate it to the client.  If they are happy, they should not have any problem paying.  Note that this also covers you in case of changing requirements.

This does not mean that there shouldn’t be a requirements/functional specification to guide you, but it does not have to be a document written in stone.  Demonstrate your interpretation to the client, and get his buy in!

I’ll ponder on this a bit more later…

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A morning at the science fair…brings back memories

Community

Scott Hanselman talks about putting a family data backup strategy in place. I have been lucky to not experience family data loss (work is something else…). I can easily imagine the devastation. Looks like mozy is something we’ll investigate.

This is old news, but MIT has made most of their courses available online via their Open CourseWare program. They have plan to make ALL their courses available by year end. Pretty incredible!

Greg Wilson has posts about the content of a new book coming out titled Beautiful Code.  It promises to be interesting! (via The Daily Grind)

Career

If you’re looking to leave development and become a product manager (for example by applying to SourceGear’s PM opening), you might want to take a look at Jeff Nash’s blog: How to be a good product manager. It is full of goodness and insight.  Even if you don’t plan a career change, it might help you deal with your product manager.

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As discussed earlier, I consider myself a generalist, as I deal with many disparate domains in my day-to-day job. I came to the conclusion that you’re even Steven either way. A specialist has a leg up if his expertise matches exactly what the position requires. The generalist might be perceived as being more adaptable. There is one area however where being a specialist gives you a definite advantage…
Consulting

It tends to be a marketing gospel that the more focus your niche market, the better off you are. If you are a consultant, marketing yourself as a jack of all trades might be tough. If you have specialized knowledge however, you are much more attractive, as a potential employer can bring you on on a temporary basis and not spend time training employees on competencies that are not core to the business.

If consulting is something you are looking to get into, I highly suggest you look at Jack Ganssle’s report: How to become a consultant.

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Ahh..recovering from the 1st sunburn of the season…
Career

Looking to work as an embedded engineer in Ireland?  Ralph Depping points out a few resources available.
Community

10 signs your software project is doomed.  Item #4 strikes a cord. (via The Daily Grind).

Hacknot has reached his boiling point with the Dynamic Language oopla going on.  An article in IEEE’s software magazine sent him over the edge into a 8000 word essay.  Well worth a read :-)  You might also want to download the Hacknot Book; a free collection of Hacknot essays
Development

Brian Button has a nice article on How to come up with a good list of test when doing TDD.

Chris Morris points out to a less that useful discussion on architecture his project had.

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