Information Technology Dark Side

Start with the values dang it I’m often surprised to encounter someone experimenting with agile who has never read the agile manifesto or the principles behind the agile manifesto. This is the place to start, and if you share these values and grok the principles behind them, you can make up your own agile process [...]

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There are only seven things you need to know to be good at HAML. Here they are.

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Ryan Bates is the owner of Railscasts.com, an invaluable resource to the Ruby on Rails developer community. Each week or so, he publishes a screencast of about ten minutes that highlights a technique in rails that he has found useful. He also maintains a number of popular ruby gems. About a week ago Ryan tweeted [...]

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Uncle Bob Martin Gets Me All Fired Up I was perusing my twitter feed this morning and found myself reading Screaming Architecture by Uncle Bob Martin. Uncle Bob is basically making the point that architecture and frameworks are not the same thing and he uses the construction design process as a metaphor for making this [...]

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Pandora’s Star by Peter F. Hamilton My rating: 2 of 5 stars I’m not finished yet – it’s a very long grind to read this book. That’s two in a row – I need a good book next!Peter Hamilton weaves an intricate plot with lots of story lines. I’ve never read a book with so [...]

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иконография PivotalTracker is super popular for a reason – it’s totally awesome. And ever since pivotallabs started charging for subscriptions, it seems to get better on a regular basis. We use PT with all of our software development projects at DeveloperTown as a natural complement to the agile development process we follow. We love using [...]

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Growth? We don’t need no stinking growth For the past three years, I’ve largely ignored the marketing, sales, and operations side of TroopTrack. I really wasn’t trying to grow my subscriber base, increase revenues, etc for a couple of reasons: I was concerned about application stability. I was getting lots and lots of emails from [...]

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иконопис How It Works DeveloperTown has an interesting business model – we get paid based on the total points of user stories accepted during a billing cycle. So if our bill rate is $500 dollars per point, and you (please pretend to be a client) accepted six stories for 10 points, rejected one stories worth [...]

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It’s time I came clean. I can’t live like this anymore! It’s too hard pretending and I’m not really suited for a double life. So here’s the simple truth: I like gold plating stuff. There, I said it. I feel better now. I know it’s wrong to gold plate things, but I am instinctively drawn [...]

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Last night a good friend of mine named Ken Martin passed away. Ken had been fighting cancer for several years and was in the final stages of his battle. I like to think that he greeted death with relief from pain and joy from reunion with two of his sons who preceded him and also [...]

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