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  • Play Your Position Until the Play Breaks Down&hellip;then Do Whatever it Takes.

    - by AjarnMark
    If I didn’t know better, I would think that K. Brian Kelley (blog | twitter) has been listening in on conversations with my boss. In his recent blog post Successful Teams: Knowing When to Step Out of Your Role, Brian describes quite clearly a philosophy that my boss has been trying to get across to everyone in the department.  We have been using sports analogies, like how important it is to play your position, until the play breaks down (such as a fumble) and then do whatever it takes it to cover each other / recover the ball / win.  While we like having very skilled people who could do a lot of different tasks, it is important that you first do your assigned tasks, and only once those are complete, or failure of the larger mission is probable, do you consider walking away from them to help someone else with their responsibilities. The thing that you cannot afford, especially on a lean team, is the really nice guy who is always trying to help out other people, but in doing so, is never quite getting his own responsibilities taken care of.  Yes, if the Running Back drops the football, you want any member of the team in the vicinity to jump on it, whether that is the leading blocker or the Quarterback.  But until the fumble happens, you want the leading blocker to focus on doing his job, and block for the Running Back.  If the blocker is doing any other job than his primary responsibility, you’re probably going to lose. This sounds logical enough, but it is really easy to go astray with the best of intentions.  This is especially true on a small, tight-knit team, where it is really easy to get sucked into someone else’s task or problem, doubly so if you think you can do it better or faster than them.  Now you are really setting yourself up for failure.  The right thing is to let the other person do the job, even if it seems less efficient in the short-run, so that you can focus on the tasks which require your expertise.  Don’t break formation…don’t abandon your assignment, until it is clear that mission failure is imminent, and even then, as Brian writes, it should be with the agreement of the mission leader. Thanks, Brian, for putting it so well.  This has been distributed throughout our department.

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  • Sentence Tree v/s Words List

    - by Rohit Jose
    I was recently tasked with building a Name Entity Recognizer as part of a project. The objective was to parse a given sentence and come up with all the possible combinations of the entities. One approach that was suggested was to keep a lookup table for all the know connector words like articles and conjunctions, remove them from the words list after splitting the sentence on the basis of the spaces. This would leave out the Name Entities in the sentence. A lookup is then done for these identified entities on another lookup table that associates them to the entity type, for example if the sentence was: Remember the Titans was a movie directed by Boaz Yakin, the possible outputs would be: {Remember the Titans,Movie} was {a movie,Movie} directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} {Remember the Titans,Movie} was a movie directed by Boaz Yakin {Remember the Titans,Movie} was {a movie,Movie} directed by Boaz Yakin {Remember the Titans,Movie} was a movie directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} Remember the Titans was {a movie,Movie} directed by Boaz Yakin Remember the Titans was {a movie,Movie} directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} Remember the Titans was a movie directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} Remember the {the titans,Movie,Sports Team} was {a movie,Movie} directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} Remember the {the titans,Movie,Sports Team} was a movie directed by Boaz Yakin Remember the {the titans,Movie,Sports Team} was {a movie,Movie} directed by Boaz Yakin Remember the {the titans,Movie,Sports Team} was a movie directed by {Boaz Yakin,director} The entity lookup table here would contain the following data: Remember the Titans=Movie a movie=Movie Boaz Yakin=director the Titans=Movie the Titans=Sports Team Another alternative logic that was put forward was to build a crude sentence tree that would contain the connector words in the lookup table as parent nodes and do a lookup in the entity table for the leaf node that might contain the entities. The tree that was built for the sentence above would be: The question I am faced with is the benefits of the two approaches, should I be going for the tree approach to represent the sentence parsing, since it provides a more semantic structure? Is there a better approach I should be going for solving it?

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  • How important is to sacriface your free time for accomplishing goals? [closed]

    - by Darf Zon
    I was reading a book about XP programming and about agile teams. While I was reading, I saw this scenario. I've never worked with a development team (just in school). So I would like what do you opine on this situation: Your boss has asked you to deliver software in a time that can only be possible to meet the project team asking if you want to work overtime without pay. All team members have young children. Discuss whether it should accept this request from your boss or should persuade the team to give their time to the organization rather than their families. What could be significant factors in the decision? As a programmer, you are offered an upgrade as project manager, but his feeling is that you can have a more effective contribution in a technical role in one administrative. Write when you should accept that promotion. Somethimes, I sacrifice my free time for accomplishing hits at work, so it's very important to me to know your opinion base of your experience.

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  • Unit and Integration testing: How can it become a reflex

    - by LordOfThePigs
    All the programmers in my team are familiar with unit testing and integration testing. We have all worked with it. We have all written tests with it. Some of us even have felt an improved sense of trust in his/her own code. However, for some reason, writing unit/integration tests has not become a reflex for any of the members of the team. None of us actually feel bad when not writing unit tests at the same time as the actual code. As a result, our codebase is mostly uncovered by unit tests, and projects enter production untested. The problem with that, of course is that once your projects are in production and are already working well, it is virtually impossible to obtain time and/or budget to add unit/integration testing. The members of my team and myself are already familiar with the value of unit testing (1, 2) but it doesn't seem to help bringing unit testing into our natural workflow. In my experience making unit tests and/or a target coverage mandatory just results in poor quality tests and slows down team members simply because there is no self-generated motivation to produce these tests. Also as soon as pressure eases, unit tests are not written any more. My question is the following: Is there any methods that you have experimented with that helps build a dynamic/momentum inside the team, leading to people naturally wanting to create and maintain those tests?

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  • Editor's Notebook: Of Slobber Pots and Flux Capacitors

    - by user462779
    Just wrapping up the contents of the November 2012 issue of Profit... I found this snippet of an interview I did with Team Oracle mechanics Clyde Greene and Chad Colberg when I was in Gary, IN this summer working on a photo shoot about Team Oracle for the current issue. We were standing around in a hangar as the Team prepared for the Chicago Air and Water Show, chatting about the engineering and design of the Oracle Challenger III aerobatic plane. Pick up a copy of Profit's November 2012 and read what Team Oracle pilot Sean D. Tucker has to say about the Oracle Challenger III and get a closer look at the plane. I'll drop a link into this blog entry as soon as the story is available. Your editor, greasy and stooped after a red eye flight, talks with Sean D. Tucker about stunt flying.

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  • PASS: 2013 Summit Location

    - by Bill Graziano
    HQ recently posted a brief update on our search for a location for 2013.  It includes links to posts by four Board members and two community members. I’d like to add my thoughts to the mix and ask you a question.  But I can’t give you a real understanding without telling you some history first. So far we’ve had the Summit in Chicago, San Francisco, Orlando, Dallas, Denver and Seattle.  Each has a little different feel and distinct memories.  I enjoyed getting drinks by the pool in Orlando after the sessions ended.  I didn’t like that our location in Dallas was so far away from all the nightlife.  Denver was in downtown but we had real challenges with hotels.  I enjoyed the different locations.  I always enjoyed the announcement during the third keynote with the location of the next Summit. There are two big events that impacted my thinking on the Summit location.  The first was our transition to the new management company in early 2007.  The event that September in Denver was put on with a six month planning cycle by a brand new headquarters staff.  It wasn’t perfect but came off much better than I had dared to hope.  It also moved us out of the cookie cutter conferences that we used to do into a model where we have a lot more control.  I think you’ll all agree that the production values of our last few Summits have been fantastic.  That Summit also led to our changing relationship with Microsoft.  Microsoft holds two seats on the PASS Board.  All the PASS Board members face the same challenge: we all have full-time jobs and PASS comes in second place professionally (or sometimes further back).  Starting in 2008 we were assigned a liaison from Microsoft that had a much larger block of time to coordinate with us.  That changed everything between PASS and Microsoft.  Suddenly we were talking to product marketing, Microsoft PR, their event team, the Tech*Ed team, the education division, their user group team and their field sales team – locally and internationally.  We strengthened our relationship with CSS, SQLCAT and the engineering teams.  We had exposure at the executive level that we’d never had before.  And their level of participation at the Summit changed from under 100 people to 400-500 people.  I think those 400+ Microsoft employees have value at a conference on Microsoft SQL Server.  For the first time, Seattle had a real competitive advantage over other cities. I’m one that looked very hard at staying in Seattle for a long, long time.  I think those Microsoft engineers have value to our attendees.  I think the increased support that Microsoft can provide when we’re in Seattle has value to our attendees.  But that doesn’t tell the whole story.  There’s a significant (and vocal!) percentage of our membership that wants the Summit outside Seattle.  Post-2007 PASS doesn’t know what it’s like to have a Summit outside of Seattle.  I think until we have a Summit in another city we won’t really know the trade-offs. I think a model where we move every third or every other year is interesting.  But until we have another Summit outside Seattle and we can evaluate the logistics and how important it is to have depth and variety in our Microsoft participation we won’t really know. Another benefit that comes with a move is variety or diversity.  I learn more when I’m exposed to new things and new people.  I believe that moving the Summit will give a different set of people an opportunity to attend. Grant Fritchey writes “It seems that the board is leaning, extremely heavily, towards making it a permanent fixture in Seattle.”  I don’t believe that’s true.  I know there was discussion of that earlier but I don’t believe it’s true now. And that brings me to my question.  Do we announce the city now or do we wait until the 2012 Summit?  I’m happy to announce Seattle vs. not-Seattle as soon as we sign the contract.  But I’d like to leave the actual city announcement until the 2011 Summit.  I like the drama and mystery of it.  I also like that it doesn’t give you a reason to skip a Summit and wait for the next one if it’s closer or back in Seattle.  The other side of the coin is that your planning is easier if you know where it is.  What do you think?

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  • Charles Barkley syndrome

    - by dacracot
    Charles Barkley was an excellent basketball player, a hall of fame, and a dream team member. He played for the 76ers, Suns, and Rockets. Yet he never won an NBA championship. Some might argue this was because he was never surrounded by other players of his caliber, and in the NBA, you can't win on your own. So what does this have to do with programming? How many of you out there feel like Sir Charles? Leading your team in every category, KLOCs, bugs fixed, systems configured... Always the one pushing for improvements, upgrading systems, negotiating with customers... Feeling like you are carrying the team. Anger just under the surface. Only to retire eventually, without "the ring"1. 1: Keep in mind, Charles never blamed his team. He just performed at his best.

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  • Wearables and UX Innovation: En Español y Inglés

    - by ultan o'broin
    Good examples of Oracle's commitment to tech diversity and to innovation can be seen everywhere. Here's a couple of videos from the Oracle Applications User Experience (UX) team, featuring Sarahi Mireles (@sarahimireles) and Noel Portugal (@noelportugal) who work together on some very cool stuff. The videos are available on the Oracle Technology Network Architecture (OTNArchBeat) Community Video Channel on YouTube. Sarahi and Noel show you how cool people work together on some awesome innovations, worldwide. Sarahi Mireles showing off a Spanish language Pebble watch Facebook notification. The videos are in Spanish and English and feature the latest in wearable technology that the UX team is exploring and that UX team members themselves love to use. Check out what they have to say in your preferred language. Manos libres y vista al frente: Con el futuro puesto Heads Up and Hands Free: Wearing the Future Interested in knowing more or joining us? Find out more on Facebook about the Oracle Applications User Experience team and the Oracle Mexico Development Center.

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  • Development teams do not scale

    - by Matt Watson
    Recently I have been thinking about how development teams don't scale very well. The bigger a team and the product get, the more time the team spends fixing software bugs. This means they spend more time doing troubleshooting and debugging as the grow. The problem is that since developers don't typically have access to production servers, there is a bottleneck in the process when doing production troubleshooting.For a team that has 10 developers, I would guess than 0-2 of them have access to production servers. If that team grows to 20 people, it is probably the same 0-2 people that have production access still. This means that those 2 key people are a bottleneck and the team does not scale correctly as you add more resources. All those new developers want is to help track down and fix software bugs, but they don't have the visibility to do it. So they end up being less productive and frustrated because they really want to fix the problems. The people who do have production access end up spending too much of their time doing troubleshooting instead of working on new projects.The solution is to remove the bottlenecks and get those people working on more important tasks. Stackify can solve this problem by giving all the developers read only access to production servers. This allows them to access the information they need to do troubleshooting on their own.

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  • TFS Hosting: discountasp.net TFS

    - by Enrique Lima
    In the last month or so I have been able to test and experience first hand the offering from discountasp.net for hosted TFS 2010. This first part is a description of the setup process for the account itself and getting some additional information on what you will find through the portal on their site. Not long ago, I posted a little tidbit on hosting TFS.  Through it I also did a shameless plug to my employer, our services and the type of hosting we recommend.  So, wouldn’t me running on discountasp.net be an issue?  Actually? NO. Ok, enough rambling.  Let’s get some details here. It is a Software as a Service model.  Through it we get Source Control, Version Control, Work Item Tracking and such.  What about Build?  If your need includes Build Management and such, you may need to look at some other options.  But, still this is a great offering for those that are moving from SourceSafe.  Or organizations who have 3 to 5 developers on staff, and do not foresee getting larger anytime soon.  Can it support more than 5 developers?  Yes, but then we need to get into how are you using TFS.  Do you need more than just Basic?  For example, SharePoint and Reporting Services integration. The signup process was seamless! Very easy to follow, complete and transition to Visual Studio to start working. An email followed the signup process, it contained details on how to get to the Team Foundation Server Control Panel login.  Once there, here is what I saw after the initial setup process of naming my Team Project Collection: So, moving on … once I clicked the area to get my server info, I got the following: Then it was a matter of getting the first user in there: Then on to connecting Visual Studio to my hosted TFS. Getting the server information, and the user account created I will configure those options in Visual Studio. Using Team Explorer, I am adding a new server configuration. Once this is provided, click OK, I will be challenged for a username and password, provide them and you will land on the following screen. Then Click Close. You will now be connected to your server and Team Project Collection. Since this will likely be the first time connecting, you will have no Projects (I already have 2 going). Click Connect, and you will be back in Team Explorer. My next post in the topic will be on Creating your First Team Project and uploading a Project Template to the server.

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  • Core debugger enhancements in VS2010

    Since my team offers "parallel debugging", we refer to the team delivering all the other debugging features as the "core debugger" team. They have published a video of new VS2010 debugger features that I encourage you to watch to find out about enhancements with DataTips, breakpoints, dump debugging (inc. IL interpreter) and Threads window.The raw list of features with short description is also here. Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • Scrum: What if the Product Owner has tasks?

    - by Lauren J
    I have just started working with a team that has picked up some aspects of Scrum (two week timeboxing) but not others (the team does not currently agree to all estimates or to the number of points in a sprint, but I'll change this soon.) The product owner is also a technical resource (scientist) with some development background. Is it appropriate to have the product owner's tasks (which mostly involve research) mixed in with the team's tasks (some of which are research and some development).

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  • Update: TFS Power Tools March 2011

    - by Enrique Lima
    There is an update available for the TFS Power Tools and the TFS Build Power Tools. Among the updates to the Tools: Changes to the Team Foundation Server Backups Add-In for TFS Admin Console. Added functionality to the Windows Shell Extension. Changes to the tfpt command line tool that allows you to script build management commands. For a full detail of the changes, read Brian Harry’s post  http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2011/03/03/mar-11-team-foundation-server-power-tools-are-available.aspx To download the Power Tools: Team Foundation Server Power Tools Team Foundation Server Build Extensions Power Tool

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  • Do we need to adopt a black-box asset our project is inheriting from its predecessor?

    - by Tom Anderson
    Our client has an eCommerce site which was developed by an in-house team, and is now showing its age. I work for a firm brought in as external contractors to build a replacement. Part of the current site is a Flash viewer applet which displays media about the product - zoom-able images, 360-degree views, movies, and so on. We need to show the same media the current site does, so we are simply reusing the viewer. The viewer is embedded on a page in the usual way, and told what media to show by means of an XML file it loads from our server, which is pretty simple for us to generate. We've got this working; it was pretty straightforward. But what else do we need to do? The thing is, as far as we're concerned, the viewer is a binary blob which is served from the client's content-distribution network. We embed it, feed it some XML, and it does its job, but we have no power over its internals. It's completely opaque to us - a black box. We can use it to do what it does, but we can't change it, so if we ever need to do something different, we're stuffed. We're building this site for the client, and when we're done, we'll hand it over for them to maintain. We won't be doing the maintenance ourselves. There's a small team within the client who are working as part of our team, and who will be the ones doing the maintenance. That team only includes one person from the team that built the old site, and it's not someone who knows the image viewer. The people who do know the image viewer are not slated to join our team when our system replaces theirs - they'll be moved to other projects. The documentation on the viewer is extremely thin, and as far as i know doesn't cover the internals at all. My worry is that if someone doesn't take some positive action, all knowledge of the internal workings of the viewer - even down to where the source code for it is - will be lost. It's possible it already has been. Is this something to worry about? If so, whose job is it to worry about it? What should they do about it once they've got worried?

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  • Group Matchmaking

    - by Simon Kérouack
    Consider different groups(1 or more players) queuing together, we want to make 2 opposing teams containing each the same amount of players while keeping the groups together. At the same time we want to make both teams' average ranking as close as possible. Now also consider we have as a working set the subset of groups currently queuing within a given ranking range. For an example, let's say we have the following groups, ordered by queuing time: Id, playerCount, totalRank, avgRank 0, 3, 126, 42 1, 2, 60, 30 2, 1, 25, 25 3, 2, 80, 40 4, 1, 40, 40 5, 1, 20, 20 6, 3, 150, 50 for this specific subset, the expected output should ideally be: team1: 0, 1 (total: 186) team2: 2, 5, 6 (total: 195) up to now the solution I have been using is to balance out each team by making each team pick the group with highest ranking within the subset turn by turn. The team who picks is the one with the currently lowest average rank unless one is already full. If one team is already full the other team tries to complete itself with groups that would make the rank gap as small as possible. This solution turns out to have issues with frequent edge cases and I'm looking for a better solution, or some fine-tuning that could be made. In most cases, players seems to want teams of 5 people and queue in group of 2. Our average subset when 2 teams of 5 are chosen is made of about 14 players if that may be of any help.

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  • How to represent an agile project to people focused on waterfall [closed]

    - by ahsteele
    Our team has been asked to represent our development efforts in a project plan. No one is unhappy with our work or questioning our ability to deliver, we are just participating in an IT cattle call for project plans. Trouble is we are an agile team and haven't thought about our work in terms of a formal project plan. While we have a general idea of what we are working on next we aren't 100% sure until we plan an iteration. Until now our team has largely operated in a vacuum and has not been required to present our methodology or metrics to outside parties. We follow most of the practices espoused in Extreme Programming. We hold quarterly planning meetings to have a general idea of the stories we are going to work on for a quarter. That said, our stories are documented on 3x5 cards and are only estimated at the beginning of the iteration in which they are going to be worked. After estimation we document the story in Team Foundation Sever. During an iteration, we attach code to stories and mark stories as completed once finished. From this data we are able to generate burn down and velocity charts. Most importantly we know our average velocity for an iteration keeping us from biting off more than we can chew. I am not looking to modify the way we do development but want to present our development activities in a report that someone only familiar with waterfall will understand. In What Does an Agile Project Plan Look Like, Kent McDonald does a good job laying out the differences between agile and waterfall project plans. He specifies the differences in consumable bullets: An agile project plan is feature based An Agile Project Plan is organized into iterations An Agile Project Plan has different levels of detail depending on the time frame An Agile Project Plan is owned by the Team Being able to explain the differences is great, but how best to present the data?

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  • Please help me decide if I should I change jobs [closed]

    - by KindaNewbie
    About me: I am very entrepreneurial and believe I would do well working solo as a consultant and possibly hiring help. I do want to do that at some point. I love to learn and a good challenge. Please help me make this decision! Current job (I am there for about 4 years): Pros: secure job good pay (I guess I am 80 percentile for my level/geographical area) large corporation - main business is not software excellent health insurance for low cost to me, pension, 401k matching, 6 weeks paid time off per year small dev team use of latest technologies (mostly WPF/silverlight) low supervision (I can do personal things all the time) I get to do a lot of moonlighting and my goal was to go solo full-time in a year or so. Cons: small team of non-professional devs 50% of my time I do things I don't enjoy projects are not meaningful to the organization If I left it wouldn't be too hard for them - business would resume as usual. Nobody besides my small team of 3 has any idea about software development whatsoever. Prospect job: Pros: small/agile software company same salary as current job same size dev team but all are very sharp (I would probably be the weakest of the team in the beginning) technology used is outside my comfort zone (latest cool web technolgies such as html5/jquery/...) - I am not a web dev and they know that. ton of learning opportunity Start-up - possibility of stock option/partial ownership of some sort Cons: Small office space - not able to do personal things as often (may be pro) No room for moonlighting less benefits (but salary can compensate for that)

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  • Office arangement - comfort vs. teamwork?

    - by finrod
    Our team works in an open-space office. Luckily the cubicles are quite big (L shaped tables for everyone!), there is quite a lot of space so we are not sandwiched. Without going into further detail, there are comfortable spots (window), normal spots and stupid spots (near the corridor). Until recently, the development team of twelve engineers was seated so that all types of spots were occupied and we were all close together. In the old arrangement, verbal communication was very easy - half of the team was withing talking distance. The other half was like ten steps away. Often times I could ask, discuss, solve problems without leaving the cube. Most of the communication is work related, no bullshit or mental masturbation that would unnecessarily distract others. Now we have moved to another part of the building and have larger space to occupy. At this point, everyone could pick their spot. Naturally all stupid spots are left empty (for the poor newcomers to occupy bwehaha). In the new arrangement, the development team is stretched across the floor and some of the key engineers are seated 'far' from each other - definitely not within talking distance. I have yet to experience how this works out but am getting concerned that team work and communication may have been traded for personal comfort. Finally the questions... What do you think is better office arrangement? Such that allows for free verbal communication but trading for some developer's comfort, or such that potentially hinders verbal communication but makes developer's more comfortable in their spot? Or maybe it does not matter at all and we will evolve to be efficient in any arrangement? What is your personal experience? Note - yes I read books and posts how workplace is important in our job. However in this case - we are all still in open space and the difference between the different spots are not really groundbreaking. So I'm thinking the little comfort that few developers gain is not worth the loss of easy communication.

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  • How important is to sacrifice your free time for accomplishing goals? [closed]

    - by Darf Zon
    I was reading a book about XP programming and about agile teams. While I was reading, I saw this scenario. I've never worked with a development team (just in school). So I would like what do you opine on this situation: Your boss has asked you to deliver software in a time that can only be possible to meet the project team asking if you want to work overtime without pay. All team members have young children. Discuss whether it should accept this request from your boss or should persuade the team to give their time to the organization rather than their families. What could be significant factors in the decision? As a programmer, you are offered an upgrade as project manager, but his feeling is that you can have a more effective contribution in a technical role in one administrative. Write when you should accept that promotion. Somethimes, I sacrifice my free time for accomplishing hits at work, so it's very important to me to know your opinion base of your experience.

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  • At times, you need to hire a professional.

    - by Phil Factor
    After months of increasingly demanding toil, the development team I belonged to was told that the project was to be canned and the whole team would be fired.  I’d been brought into the team as an expert in the data implications of a business re-engineering of a major financial institution. Nowadays, you’d call me a data architect, I suppose.  I’d spent a happy year being paid consultancy fees solving a succession of interesting problems until the point when the company lost is nerve, and closed the entire initiative. The IT industry was in one of its characteristic mood-swings downwards.  After the announcement, we met in the canteen. A few developers had scented the smell of death around the project already hand had been applying unsuccessfully for jobs. There was a sense of doom in the mass of dishevelled and bleary-eyed developers. After giving vent to anger and despair, talk turned to getting new employment. It was then that I perked up. I’m not an obvious choice to give advice on getting, or passing,  IT interviews. I reckon I’ve failed most of the job interviews I’ve ever attended. I once even failed an interview for a job I’d already been doing perfectly well for a year. The jobs I’ve got have mostly been from personal recommendation. Paradoxically though, from years as a manager trying to recruit good staff, I know a lot about what IT managers are looking for.  I gave an impassioned speech outlining the important factors in getting to an interview.  The most important thing, certainly in my time at work is the quality of the résumé or CV. I can’t even guess the huge number of CVs (résumés) I’ve read through, scanning for candidates worth interviewing.  Many IT Developers find it impossible to describe their  career succinctly on two sides of paper.  They leave chunks of their life out (were they in prison?), get immersed in detail, put in irrelevancies, describe what was going on at work rather than what they themselves did, exaggerate their importance, criticize their previous employers, aren’t  aware of the important aspects of a role to a potential employer, suffer from shyness and modesty,  and lack any sort of organized perspective of their work. There are many ways of failing to write a decent CV. Many developers suffer from the delusion that their worth can be recognized purely from the code that they write, and shy away from anything that seems like self-aggrandizement. No.  A resume must make a good impression, which means presenting the facts about yourself in a clear and positive way. You can’t do it yourself. Why not have your resume professionally written? A good professional CV Writer will know the qualities being looked for in a CV and interrogate you to winkle them out. Their job is to make order and sense out of a confused career, to summarize in one page a mass of detail that presents to any recruiter the information that’s wanted. To stand back and describe an accurate summary of your skills, and work-experiences dispassionately, without rancor, pity or modesty. You are no more capable of producing an objective documentation of your career than you are of taking your own appendix out.  My next recommendation was more controversial. This is to have a professional image overhaul, or makeover, followed by a professionally-taken photo portrait. I discovered this by accident. It is normal for IT professionals to face impossible deadlines and long working hours by looking more and more like something that had recently blocked a sink. Whilst working in IT, and in a state of personal dishevelment, I’d been offered the role in a high-powered amateur production of an old ex- Broadway show, purely for my singing voice. I was supposed to be the presentable star. When the production team saw me, the air was thick with tension and despair. I was dragged kicking and protesting through a succession of desperate grooming, scrubbing, dressing, dieting. I emerged feeling like “That jewelled mass of millinery, That oiled and curled Assyrian bull, Smelling of musk and of insolence.” (Tennyson Maud; A Monodrama (1855) Section v1 stanza 6) I was then photographed by a professional stage photographer.  When the photographs were delivered, I was amazed. It wasn’t me, but it looked somehow respectable, confident, trustworthy.   A while later, when the show had ended, I took the photos, and used them for work. They went with the CV to job applications. It did the trick better than I could ever imagine.  My views went down big with the developers. Old rivalries were put immediately to one side. We voted, with a show of hands, to devote our energies for the entire notice period to getting employable. We had a team sourcing the CV Writer,  a team organising the make-overs and photographer, and a third team arranging  mock interviews. A fourth team determined the best websites and agencies for recruitment, with the help of friends in the trade.  Because there were around thirty developers, we were in a good negotiating position.  Of the three CV Writers we found who lived locally, one proved exceptional. She was an ex-journalist with an eye to detail, and years of experience in manipulating language. We tried her skills out on a developer who seemed a hopeless case, and he was called to interview within a week.  I was surprised, too, how many companies were experts at image makeovers. Within the month, we all looked like those weird slick  people in the ‘Office-tagged’ stock photographs who stare keenly and interestedly at PowerPoint slides in sleek chromium-plated high-rise offices. The portraits we used still adorn the entries of many of my ex-colleagues in LinkedIn. After a months’ worth of mock interviews, and technical Q&A, our stutters, hesitations, evasions and periphrastic circumlocutions were all gone.  There is little more to relate. With the résumés or CVs, mugshots, and schooling in how to pass interviews, we’d all got new and better-paid jobs well  before our month’s notice was ended. Whilst normally, an IT team under the axe is a sad and depressed place to belong to, this wonderful group of people had proved the power of organized group action in turning the experience to advantage. It left us feeling slightly guilty that we were somehow cheating, but I guess we were merely leveling the playing-field.

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  • Think Before You Leap - Life is Dangerous for Change Agents

    - by technodrone
    So you want to introduce agile methods to your team... The following are some "lessons learned" when from someone who advocated agile/scrum to a group that was not ready for it. "Change agents, in my experience, face negative consequences. Sometimes, most of the time at the beginning, it's painful. This is the question you might have to ask yourself. Do you want to be a developer in scrum project or do you want be a scrum master managing the process? I think with proper mentoring/training, you can become good scrum master. But is that what you want? if yes, you can go ahead, take the training. if you want to be a developer, you may not need to be certified  as scrum master. You can just pick up from a book such as Mike Cohn new book Succeeding with Agile, I am reading it now. It's good. In my experience, I did waste my resources by trying to change the culture. It cost me lot. Instead, I should have focused on technical practices that are core to agile. Then look for teams that are good at agile. I would have saved lot of energy, and time. Try baby steps first yourself in the company, and next with the team, starting with technical practices like writing unit tests, SOLID principles, patterns, refactoring, continuous integration, pairing, and peer code reviews. These have inherent pull that can bring collaboration from a team.  Once you see team adaption in core practices, then you can introduce scrum concepts like user stories/task board etc.  This idea of Leading by example seems to be working for most of the agile folks. You can pitch core practices to the manager, and the team, and start showing them how you are doing.  You can put a road map for agile adaption and you can pitch to your manager. I would include need for scrum master training as part of the road map. " I thought about his advice for a couple of weeks and read about the pitfalls of technical debt and the team not having prior awareness of agile methods. The more I read and think about it the more I think he was right.  What do you think?

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  • how to convince other we should move to hadoop?

    - by Ramy
    Everything I've read about Hadoop seems like exactly the technology we need to make our enterprise more scalable. We have terabytes of raw data that is in non-relational form (text files of some kind). We're quickly approaching the upper limits of what our centralized file server can handle and everyone is aware of this. Most people on the tech team, especially the more junior members of the tech team are all in favor of moving from the central file system to HDFS. The problem is, there is one key (most senior, etc.) member of the team who is resisting this change and every time Hadoop comes up, he tells us that we could simply add another file server and be in the clear. So, my question (and yes, it's really subjective, but I need more help with this than any of my other questions) is what steps can we take to get upper management to move forward with Hadoop despite the hesitation of one member of the team?

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  • Programming methodologies at stackoverflow

    - by Prototype Stark
    I am in the middle of starting up a software company where we would use ASP.NET MVC and ASP.NET WebAPI extensively at shop. We will be a group of 4 and no more than 10 will work on any particular project at any point in time(these are ground rules). I would like to know, what programming methodologies best suit a small(guerilla) team. Specifically, I would also like to know which ones are being used at famous ASP.NET MVC shops like Stackoverflow. The ones I know are: Scrum and Waterfall(I know its bad). But what's the recommended way of development for smaller, group of 9-10 team. Also, will Test Driven Development help such a team in producing quality software? Are there any other techniques the team will have to know to be good at producing quality software?

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  • Aggregate root & Repository dilemma

    - by mateoc
    I am in a big dilemma here. I have a League, Team and Player entities. I have created a repo for the league only as a Team cannot exists without a League. At first I had bounded the players only with the team but then I realised I would have a problem with free agents so I also bounded the players to the league. Then I was wondering if a player could exists without a League or a Team and I am totally confused to that question. So would you make a player repository or include them in the league repo? Thanks

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  • Oracle OpenWorld Highlights

    - by Doug Reid
    We are in the final days of Oracle OpenWorld 2012 and the data integration team have been hard at work giving sessions, meeting customers, demonstrating product and conducting hands-on labs.    It has been a great conference, but the best part is meeting our customers and learning about all the great implementations of our products.  Wednesday was the last day that the exhibition hall was open and attendees were getting in their final opportunities to see our products and meet with the product management team.   Two hours before the close of the hall, people lined up to learn about GoldenGate 11gR2, Monitor, Adapters, Veridata, and all the different use cases.    Here's a picture of Sjaak Vossepoel, who is our DIS Sales Consulting Manager for EMEA speaking to a potential customer on the options of using Oracle GoldenGate for heterogenous data replication.  Over the last two days, the GoldenGate team ran two labs; Introduction to Oracle GoldenGate Veridata and Deep Dive into Oracle GoldenGate.   Both of the labs were completely booked out and unfortunately we had to turn away people.   BUT,  all of our labs were recorded recently so if you were not able to get into the lab or did not have enough time to complete your labs, visit youtube.com/oraclegoldengate to see a  complete recording of the labs we used at OpenWorld plus more.  Here are a couple pictures from the Deep Dive into Oracle GoldenGate lead by Chis Lawless from the Product Management team.   Thanks to the GoldenGate Hands-on Lab team for putting on a great session!!! We will post more information about where you can find additional details on OpenWorld as they become public.   

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