blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Be Nice
http://blog.abakas.com/2009/06/be-nice.html
Friday, June 12, 2009. Your attitude is one of the most powerful tools in your professional arsenal. How you choose to interact with people will ultimately govern how well you can do your job. And there are two things you control there: the circle of people with whom you interact, and how you talk (write, etc) to them. There are two circles you work with. First there are those who you work with constantly and who understand that when you say, "what moron would check in something like that? You'll feel pr...
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Mind Your Words
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/10/mind-your-words.html
Friday, October 19, 2012. When you're surrounded by other engineers all day, it's easy to forget that some words have other meanings. Take "CRUD", for example. In engineering, that's shorthand for Create Retrieve Update Delete - your standard data operations. In real life, it's a derogatory term. At several of my client sites, we use CRUD as engineers do. "Yeah, I've just implemented the CRUD operations; it's not pretty yet." "That's just a CRUD workflow? CRUD looks good.". Brent’s Favorite Bug.
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Management by Monopoly Money
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/10/management-by-monopoly-money.html
Tuesday, October 16, 2012. Management by Monopoly Money. I work with a lot of different teams, and almost all of them have some concept of a backlog. Basically, it's a list in some approximation of priority that the team works from. How they pull off the backlog and how stuff moves around the backlog varies a bit, but that's the basic idea. Yup, Monopoly money! Here's how it works:. Set a total budget amount that reflects the total amount of work you expect the team to accomplish. Discovering the human s...
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Status Message Messaging
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/09/status-message-messaging.html
Tuesday, September 11, 2012. Here's part of a status update Beanstalk. Sorry for the continued problems and ruining your morning.". Frequency of updates. At least every hour for most issues, and whenever something changes there should be a status update. Silence does not inspire confidence. Location of updates. As many channels as possible are good. Use twitter, the status page, email or phone calls to really important customers, and any other tools at your disposal. Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom).
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Abakas: Good Software Makes Decisions
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/08/good-software-makes-decisions.html
Thursday, August 16, 2012. Good Software Makes Decisions. No one wants to use that. It's software that has taken all of the complexity of the problem space and barfed it out onto the user. That's not what they wanted. I promise. Even if it's what they asked for, it's not what they wanted. Building software is about making decisions. Good software limits options; it doesn't add them. You start with a massive problem space: "Software can do anything! Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom). 169; 2010 Abakas LLC.
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: How I Do Pull Requests
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/10/how-i-do-pull-requests.html
Wednesday, October 31, 2012. How I Do Pull Requests. I've been working with a couple new developers lately and we've been talking about how we actually write, review and check in code. Early on, we all agreed that we would use a shared repository and pull requests. That way we get good peer code reviews, and we can look at each other's work in progress code. One of the developers approached me after that conversation and said, "umm, so how exactly do I do pull requests? On Github, here's how I do it:.
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Automate What?
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/09/automate-what.html
Tuesday, September 18, 2012. I was in a meeting the other day, talking about an upcoming project. I made some offhand comment about needing to make sure we allowed for a continuous integration and test automation environment when we were sizing our hardware needs. The response was immediate: "but automation never works! After a bit of discussion, it emerged that this team had never attempted automation at any level under the GUI, and their GUI automation was, well, not good. September 18, 2012 at 3:43 PM.
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: A Few CSS Pet Peeves
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/11/a-few-css-pet-peeves.html
Monday, November 12, 2012. A Few CSS Pet Peeves. I wanted to share the CSS tips and bugaboos I've articulated for myself (and my team) over the past few weeks:. Use a dynamic stylesheet language. I don't care which one - sass, less or something else - but use a stylesheet language. CSS is much easier when you can use variables, mixins, and other things we programmers take for granted elsewhere. Plus, who really likes doing search and replace on hex codes? I'm not a fan of. Html safe is a minor code smell.
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Don't Forget the Joy
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/09/dont-forget-joy.html
Friday, September 14, 2012. Don't Forget the Joy. Work is, well, work. It's also an open secret that we're better workers when we have fun at work. We're more productive. We help the bottom line. And we're more likely to stay in a job longer if we enjoy our jobs. So let's roll up our sleeves and get to work, but don't forget the joy! As an employer, there are things I can do to help make work more fun. Most of them aren't even very expensive! Letting someone go speak at a conference costs about 20 hours ...
blog.abakas.com
Abakas: Installing Umbraco Packages
http://blog.abakas.com/2012/10/installing-umbraco-packages.html
Thursday, October 11, 2012. Just a quick tech note today, for anyone using Umbraco. I was attempting to install a package from the Umbraco package repository and kept getting an error: ERR NAME NOT RESOLVED. It looked like a DNS error, but I couldn't find any DNS problems! I finally found the right answer: it's the world's most poorly formed permissions problem. Give your IIS user read, write and execute permissions on c: Windows Temp, and the problem will go away. October 11, 2012 at 6:30 PM.
