Category: Tech

Au revoir to .NET, & .NET open source

Through a combination of switching to the Mac, moving to a new company that’s almost entirely a Java shop (more on that soon!), and becoming significantly ‘post-technical’, I’ve decided to bow out of my .NET open source projects, and I doubt I’ll be doing any .NET coding for a while.

I’ve been one of the project leads for CruiseControl.NET for nearly 4 years. Doing so has been a great experience and opportunity, and I’d like to thank all of the people who have contributed to CCNet in this time. CCNet still holds its own in a CI-tool landscape increasingly populated by commercial offerings, and the reason it can do so is largely down to its community. Owen Rogers, the rock of CCNet since its inception, will be holding the reigns by himself for now.

I’m also handing over Tree Surgeon, my own pet project for helping people start .NET projects off on the right standing. Bil Simser has graciously agreed to take it over, and has some great ideas so I’m sure this is a good step forward for the project. Bil has moved Tree Surgeon to Codeplex, so you should look there for all future activity.

This is ‘au revoir’ though, and not goodbye. I think C# is one of the most interesting software languages in the world today with all the new things that are happening to it, and who knows where I may be and what I may be doing in a few years time.

Furthermore, this is not the end of this blog or my being part of the agile software community. Indeed, I hope that this change will allow me to spend more time on some different areas. Ah heck, who am I kidding, once a build monkey, always a build monkey!

Intolerable

It’s already most of the way round the blogosphere by now, but I just wanted to join in the voices of condemnation against the people who have abused Kathy Sierra.

I use the word ‘abuse’ quite purposefully. It is, in my mind, criminal to threaten someone in such a way, and should not be toleratated.

I was disheartened, but unfortunately not surprised, to hear of Desi McAdam’s retelling of what one of her (male) associates said of the matter, basically ‘yeah, it’s going to happen, she’s just got to suck it up. If it was a man no-one would care.’. Did the suffragettes just ‘suck it up’ when they believed it was unjust for them not to have the right to vote?

Apart from anything else, it completely misses the value of the individual, and without outstanding individuals like Kathy Sierra as part of our careers, and lives at large, we would suffer. It’s time we appreciate them, no matter their gender, and defend their human rights whether online or not.

Build Traffic Light. Literally.

Traffic LightOne of the most important aspects to an effective continuous integration setup is quick and obvious feedback. People have come up with lots of different red/green ‘traffic light’ monitors, from CruiseControl.NET’s CCTray to Lava Lamps. However, one team has taken the metaphor a bit further – an actual traffic light. Click here and scroll to item 12 for more detail.

XTC-NYC Iteration 2

New York’s eXtreme Tuesday kicked off with a bang 2 weeks ago – we had a turn-out of 30 or so people and it appeared everyone enjoyed themselves!

The next XTC-NYC is next Tuesday (the 6th Feb) and will take place at Silver Swan at 41 East 20th Street (just north of Union Square). This place has some great beer on tap so I’m looking forward to trying some of it out over good conversation!

More detail on the XTC-NYC blog here.

Plutoed

From here , via El Reg , Plutoed:

To demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.

I hope none of you have felt plutoed recently…

I've been blogtagged

Damn you Chris Donnan! OK, here’s my 5 things you probably don’t know about me…

1) As an 8 year old I was a member of the official ‘Masters of the Universe’ fan club.

2) Around the same time I was fascinated with road layouts and maps and was convinced I’d end up in civil engineering or cartography.

3) Finally around this time I wrote my first program. It was coded in Logo, and I think was on a Research Machines 480z. I remember being very excited about the fact it had a robotic turtle attached that would follow the commands of the program. It would be 3 years until I coded again, and I really caught the programming habit when I started secondary school at the age of 12.

4) I guess I wrote my first ‘enterprise’ application at the age of 15. It was a database-type application written in QuickBasic using flat files for storage. I remember it was big enough (~ 20000 lines) that it wouldn’t compile into a single .exe program, so even back then I was fiddling with compilers and source trees figuring out ways to build efficient dependent module schemes.

5) I was never in a band, nor have I got any famous relations. Myself and Mike Mason won a karaoke competition in our first few weeks at University though (the actual winner had left by the time the prizes were handed out…), I guess that’s the closest I’ve come to artistic superstardom.

And on that note, I tag Mike Mason, Joe Walnes, Jay Fields, Ivan Moore and Patrick Kua.

Announcing the eXtreme Tuesday Club, New York Edition

The original eXtreme Tuesday Club (XTC) is a weekly gathering of eXtreme Programming practitioners that has taken place in London for 8 years or so. It has provided a great community for like-minded software developers, managers and coaches to get together in a very informal way to discuss the ups and downs of using XP and other agile Software Development methods on a wide variety of projects in all sorts of organisations.

I got a lot out of London’s XTC when I lived there. Even though I wasn’t a ‘regular’ I still found it a great place to pop along to every now and then when I was in the mood. I miss the informality / beer / random banter that it provided so I’ve decided to kick off a similar event here in New York City. I’m not sure if the US / UK cultures are aligned enough that it will work, but you don’t know if you don’t try.

For now, XTC-NYC will be every first and third Tuesday of the month, starting on January 16th at the Heartland Brewery, Union Square. I expect the first 3 months or so will be a little bit of an inception phase (my little joke…) as we settle on a venue that works well.

For more info, and to keep track of future events, go to http://xtcnyc.blogspot.com/ .

I look forward to seeing anyone who can come on the 16th!