Blog
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5 months banking with Simple
Five months ago I opened a bank account with Simple. Here are some thoughts of how things are going so far.
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Agile people over agile process
In June 2012 I gave a talk at QCon New York titled 'Agile people over Agile process'. The full talk is here, and below are some of my thoughts on this topic.
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Hiking Breakneck Ridge
With the weather finally cooling off a little in New York it was time last weekend to get out of the city and into the countryside. I'd been wanting to get back to the beautiful Hudson Valley for some time so on Sunday morning we got an early rise to head to Breakneck Ridge.
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Hiking with Avenza PDF Maps
The hike on Sunday gave me the first opportunity to use a new app on my iPhone in the wild - Avenza PDF Maps.
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Leaving DRW, and my take on Customer Affinity
Last month I finished working at DRW Trading after nearly 4 years there. DRW has a fantastic technical organization on both the Software Engineering (SE) and IT Operations side, from the leaders (CTO Lyle Hayhurst, COO Seth Thomson and Director of SE Derek Groothuis) down. In many ways I expect this will be one of the best jobs I ever have - my technical colleagues were fantastic (especially Jay Fields, my right hand man for the last 18 months), my team had complete management and implementation control of our projects, I didn't have to deal with much in the way of politics at all, and yes, the pay was good!
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Book Review - William Gibson's 'Virtual Light'
Virtual Light by William Gibson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars -
Online music stores finally fit my needs
I've been somewhat of a luddite up until now with my music purchases - almost all of them have been CDs - since I've not been a fan of buying downloaded music from iTunes, eMusic, etc. My main gripes with downloads were:
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Syncing music to iPod / iPhone from lossless iTunes library
For listening to music at home I use an Apple TV plugged into my fancyish sound system, and so I use music stored in lossless format. Since I use an Apple TV this music is stored on a computer using iTunes. I also have an iPhone, and my music library is on there too, but I can't fit my entire lossless library on there (it's more than 100GB) so up until now I've also kept a totally separate iTunes library, on a different computer, with the same music in 128kbps AAC format that can fit on my iPhone.
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Dual KVM Pairing
Previously when I've pair programmed (2 people programming at the same computer at the same time) I've always used one keyboard, screen and mouse (KVM - V means Video). In the last couple of weeks I've been trying out 'dual KVM' pairing though - in this scenario each programmer has their own keyboard, mouse and monitor, where the screens are setup to mirror each other (each person sees exactly the same thing)
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Experience using Scala as a functional testing language
6 months ago my team decided to migrate our functional tests to being coded in Scala rather than Java, the native language our application is written in. However we have now reverted back to writing them in plain Java. What follows is an experience report of this exercise and our reasons for bringing it to an end.