aussie coder . com

Reading this post by Davy Brion raised a few thoughts in my head, and I thought I’d put them here.

Davy talks about who you pay attention to for guidance in becoming a better .NET developer – the Microsoft experts, the Alt .NET and community experts, finding other places – what is the best direction to head.

In the end he comes up with use your own judgement, common sense can guide you.

I agree with that, but I generally do follow blogs, listen to ideas that bubble up over and over, if I hear about patterns or practices that someone recommends then I go and Google it, research it.

Generally, if someone’s willing to pay for a book for it to be made, and if people are willing to buy it, then it’s worth a look at the ideas in there.  I’d pay attention to topics that show up on places like Dot Net Rocks, Hanselminutes, Codebetter, Los Techies, screencasts around the place.

Basically, anyone willing to put ideas forward in a public forum, have the conversation and go through the wringer.

And then, like Davy recommends, I’d choose the parts that make sense to me and try them out – generally you find out pretty quick if you’re headed down the wrong path.

That being said, for me, I’m mostly following my manager   It helps to have a cohesive architecture, and as well, to paraphrase something Robert Scoble once wrote:

“I’m following thousands of people, reading tens of thousands of pieces of information a day and talking to industry leaders, who do you read?”

“You.”

For all the things I read and come across, my manager does as well, and I find if we are generally talking to each other about topics that interest the both of us then it’s generally something that’s worth a bit more research.

I think the best way you can find the right path is to find someone else as interested in learning as you are, get to a .NET User Group, or see what the community leaders are interested in – but do your own research.

A funny topic came up today at work that I thought I’d share.

We’ve been working on a project for the better part of the year and been really optimistic with it, even though there’s been false starts on it previously, and the users have only been interested in it from the point of view of “it’d be nice to have but it’s creating work for me”.

We’ve gotten it deployed to a couple of users for testing and they’ve been slow to get interested in actually doing that, but we went ahead with one today and it’s making us second guess a decision.

We have certain events that something can perform on a product, such as adding elements – now we decided from the start that we were going with an optimistic view, so that you could only add events to the queue.

So, lets say we create a product, and then we do an addition to it – but we accidentally add to the wrong product – what would you do?  Well, we made it so that you could adjust that product, so that you could take it back to the original state.

But in the history of that product it would record that, and we can report on the adjustments made.

The first time the user struck that, day 1 of testing, and he was horrified – he didn’t want to adjust and took that as the wrong way to progress – because his adjustment would be seen by one of the bean-counters in accounting and that would be seen as a very negative thing to him.

So we’re back to the drawing board on having to redo all our objects, or rather the events, to undo and wind back changes – which means a minor re-architecture.

And this guy was in all the architecture meetings, made the decisions with the others, and we had discussed the way things were going to be adjusted.

I don’t know what we take away from this, but I still think we went down the right path because we ended up with a fairly beautiful and efficient user story, for the interface and the processes – we were just a tad too optimistic about what they would accept on the perception of when things went the wrong way!

Just to document some things I’d like to achieve this year, unless I completely forget or other priorities take over

1. After having listened to the last couple of Hanselminutes episodes I’d like to study a bit more on the current architecture standards coming through the .NET community.  The shows I am referring to are:

• Show 140 – Rob Conery on Domain Driven Design
• Show 145 – SOLID Principles with Robert C. Martin
• Show 146 – Test Driven Development with Scott Bellware

Basically, all these three shows have got me back into being interested in hearing more Hanselminutes (I chose the shows to listen while driving for a trip), but more than that they resonated with what we’re already trying to do, or to achieve at work.

For instance, although we probably don’t really follow DDD, we do have a pretty tight cohesion to the companies domain, terminology, and processes.  A lot of what Rob Conery said actually applies to how we try to go about our software development, with the planning and dialogue we open with our users.

So the interest there would be to study a bit more of the practice of DDD, and maybe not taking the practice to heart and keeping to every principle, or pattern – but see what we’re already doing that works similar to the framework and what practices related to that we could adopt that would make sense.

Similarly, listening to Scott Bellware on Test Driven Development, although we are writing tests semi-first (I tend to unless I am having a hard time wrapping my head around some code, in which case I spike then wrap tests), I came to realise I’m probably under-thinking TDD/BDD.

My methods are coming out much like they would if I didn’t test, with overly complex tests – not simplified enough for it to be proper TDD.

Now that is kind of the way the boss wants it and the way we adopted it, but I don’t know if I’d call us a TDD shop (and I don’t think he would either, even if we are a testing shop – we work for a private company and are efficient and producing quality code anyway, so it’s kind of semantics for us).

The thing I don’t think I do enough of is considering the behaviour, or the aspect of what a method is trying to achieve before I code it up.  I mean, I understand I want to get from A-to-B with this method, I want it to achieve X reason for existing – but I don’t frame that in “for this unit of work, this is how the guys on the floor are using this, and this is the process it would go through, so the method should behave accordingly.

I honestly don’t think it’s that far of a leap from where I am now with my thought patterns, but it’s about taking that time to work that flow instead of thinking of it as purely code that achieves a function and tests that will prove that code does that function.

2. Become basically familiar with another language, either Ruby or probably Python.  This isn’t learning something so I can use it on a daily basis to a high degree – but just learning it for readability, become familiar enough so I understand what other developers are talking about, and just learn the basics for interest.

3. Read more code.  I’m pretty insular or isolated with the code that I am doing, and I do things my way and it works, but I think I need to get back to listening to podcasts, watching the rest of Rob Conery’s MVC Storefront series, and just get a better idea to improve my own development.

4. Prepare for meetings better.  Hopefully I won’t be attending that many meetings in the future, but I had the thought the other day that I walk into a lot of meetings with not much idea of what to say, and I end up being in a situation where I can be caught unprepared or put on the spot, or am just reacting.

So the idea here is to push more for an agenda for any meeting I’m attending, to come with some idea of what I’m going to say, some planned points on paper, and to try and stick to the topic – there’s nothing more that I hate than a meeting that is just all general business of whatever anyone can think of at the time, and I find a lot of the “Monday morning scheduled meetings” that occur weekly for everyone to catch up, generally, just meander unprepared and anyone will bring up whatever is on their minds at the time.

5. Self-manage better.  We have Fogbugz at work, but it’s a personal productivity tool, and if you don’t use it, it’s not really enforced.  That’s fair, but I do know I work better when I have a list of tasks in front of me, when I can cross things off and feel like I’m achieving things.

The past year while I had a project that kept my interest I’d find that I’d do the next two-four weeks scheduled work within the first few days, because I was driven, interested, and had a plan of what I had to achieve.

I have to find a good balance of spending time setting up and managing myself, so I am more productive in the other times, rather than spending all my time trying to just work and get through things, and either be caught out by things I haven’t done, things that I haven’t done timely enough, or finding myself with time that I just don’t have enough to do because I haven’t scheduled enough into my time.

There’s probably more I should be doing, but those things came to the top of my mind while driving home from my trip and I think they’re a good start!