Blog
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Agile Auckland starts next week
It seems I have timed my arrival in New Zealand, and specifically Auckland, perfectly. Agile Auckland is a new Agile User Group that has its first meeting next week (12th October). Check out the website for more details about the event and a mailing list.
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Lessons from a Successful Agile Project Part 4
Anyone that knows me would have expected me to spout on about tools and build issues by this point, and I think its pertinent how important the previous points were to this project that build gets pushed into the fourth chapter, but here it is finally.
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The people were right and the leaders were wrong
It was a spring day early last year when I joined a million other people in London alone to show my disagreement with going to war in Iraq. I'm not an actively political kind of guy, but it just seemed fundamentally wrong to be going to war over (at best) tenuous evidence. Robin Cook agreed and resigned, despite being a senior member of the UK's government and therefore having access to a whole raft of information that the general public could not see.
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Gone to the other side
Those that know me won't be all that surprised, but I've moved to New Zealand. Its all about a girl, you see. I probably don't need to say any more than that. :)
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Lessons from a Successful Agile Project Part 3
Apologies for the delay since the last installment of this series - I've been pretty busy with work and moving country. :)
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Lessons from a Successful Agile Project Part 2
Lightweight Planning
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Tuscany and Umbria
Last week I went to Italy on holiday to visit Florence, and the Tuscan countryside. Highlights were:
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Lessons from a Successful Agile Project Part 1
For the last 9 months I've been working as part of the best project I've experienced in my career so far. The project has successfully delivered into production 5 times in the space of a year, with only 2 production bugs (each of which were fixed and deployed in less than a day). The real customers are happy due to the successful delivery (and relatively low total cost), and so are the project team due to being able to deliver successfully while keeping a sustainable pace and good team spirit throughout.
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Visual Studio Web Projects considered harmful
When you want to work on a web application in Visual Studio the default behaviour is to use a project that uses Frontpage server extensions. (Web applications include ASP.NET projects or Web Services.) There are big problems with this:
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Common Absolute Paths Anti-Pattern
Some projects I've worked on in the past assume that certain files can always be found at an absolute path, eg 'c:\program files\some cool library\library.dll'. Such files may be dependencies, or deployment target locations. This is a situation to be avoided!