April 2008 Entries

What is an architect anyways?

Jeremy Miller pointed out the corollary to my comment that "good developers move to good companies." In order to attract good people, become a good company. What that company looks like is a matter of debate. It would be rather an interesting debate, too -- a true insight into what developers, on the whole value in a company. As with many other interesting discussions, there will be a set of answers that is as varied as the people themselves. Personally, at this point in time, I'd take a quick stab ...
Posted On Monday, April 21, 2008 2:51 AM | Comments (1)

Meeting Phil Haack

Since I just posted that last comment, and saw his name at the bottom of my blog in the development credits, I thought I'd just mention that I got to meet Phil Haack at the ALT .NET conference this morning, right after the session discussing the challenges of software engineering. We spoke briefly about the suitability of our names -- how he can't help but be a hack, and how all the men on my dad's side of the family are opinionated. Nice guy. Oh... and the technical discussion preceding it was good ...
Posted On Sunday, April 20, 2008 5:15 PM | Comments (0)

Who you calling an alpha geek?!

I really like the core comment made by Jeremy Miller here. Really, this is similar in flavor to the comment that Alan Cooper borrowed from Drucker. (Summary: good people are worth the cost.) Good developers tend to migrate to good shops. JP Boodhoo phrased it well. Many good developers eventually get to the point where they realize the truism "if you can't change the place where you work, change the place you work." I came to this realization several months ago. I was tired of being told things would ...
Posted On Sunday, April 20, 2008 5:11 PM | Comments (1)

Takeaways from ALT .NET Conference Seattle (Day 1)

Now that I'm a (woohoo!) bona-fide architect, in a shop that I'd categorize as agile (although I don't know enough to be able to say what flavor of agile we follow), I now have an interesting task ahead of me... taking meaningful lessons and concepts away from the ALT .NET conference and applying them to development in a team environment. Everyone at CCI is, I think, convinced of the value of agile. They're doing some pretty interesting things, including having a bunch of subject matter experts (SMEs) ...
Posted On Saturday, April 19, 2008 7:23 PM | Comments (0)

Rosario rocks (Architecture edition)

For those of you (like me!) that were unaware of it, Microsoft has released a CTP of Rosario (the next version of Visual Studio). Jeff Beehler (lead program manager on VSTS) blogged about this release a while ago. I attended the Rosario Architecture Edition preview yesterday. Frankly, I'm two orders of magnitude more excited about this than I am about anything else I've seen here at the summit yet. This past week, I came across an interesting piece of irony. I just left a job as a "software developer" ...
Posted On Wednesday, April 16, 2008 2:34 PM | Comments (0)

New job

As of 10 April, I've joined the architect team at Colorado CustomWare. This is a big change for me. A much bigger company, focused entirely on software. A team environment with lots of process in place and support structures in place. Lots and lots more interesting differences, but I only managed to get two days in the new office before heading out to Seattle... so there will be lots more interesting paradigm shifts to come
Posted On Monday, April 14, 2008 7:51 PM | Comments (0)

Strangest discussion Sunday

Got to start yesterday with the VB Insider's get-together. Then went from there to Party with Palermo. Played pool with an Israeli C# MVP (Justin).... during which he made a comment about karma. Had to laugh... of all things I expected from this week, a conversation with an Israeli in a bar about karma wasn't on the list. And I'm sure that won't be my only surprise this week
Posted On Monday, April 14, 2008 7:41 PM | Comments (1)

Renewed/MVP Summit

Yes, I know this is old news by now. I got renewed 1 April for another year as an MVP. Yes, I'm one of the April Fools' Day MVPs. (And this year, Microsoft let me sweat for several hours before letting me know that I had been renewed.) This week, I'm at the MVP summit for the first time. Seventeen hundred MVPs here this year, from all over the world. Very well run, and the quality of the people -- both the MVPs and the MIcrosoft employees -- is even more impressive than I expected. Of course, the ...
Posted On Monday, April 14, 2008 7:37 PM | Comments (0)