Performance Tuning – Being scientific and being human

Change of Direction?!

April 25, 2009· by Tammy Adler

I’m so excited we added a new Director of Business Development.

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My Behavior Driven Application Setup

April 20, 2009· by Josh Swan

Last week I showed how I setup for tools for behavior driven development on my MacBook Pro, Behavior Driven Development Environment. In this article I am going to go over how I setup a Rails application for behavior driven development.

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Things to Remember

April 19, 2009· by Eric Sorenson

This image popped into my Google Reader page a while ago and really struck a chord with me (if you haven’t tried Google Reader you should check it out!)

While I doubt this list was written by a software developer, all four points are relevant to software developers. These four points have helped me keep a clear perspective when dealing with changing requirements in a fast paced, dynamic development environment.

While it sometimes seems like it would be wonderful to have a static set of expectations, this simply isn’t realistic. We can’t — and shouldn’t — expect users to know what they want right out of the gate. Everything is always changing, and this is a good thing! Even my own expectations as a developer have been steadily evolving over the years. If you are a developer yourself, how often have you changed your development workstation? Did you know exactly what you needed in an IDE the moment you sat down to write your first application? Probably not. We’re really not any different from anyone else when it comes to knowing what we want in advance.

If the users of an application are not regularly changing their minds and/or coming up with new ideas, they either have paranormal abilities, or your application isn’t going to be a good fit for their needs. It’s in everyone’s best interest to use tools, languages, frameworks and methodologies that encourage the team to continually refocus priorities and requirements.

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My Behavior Driven Development Environment

April 14, 2009· by Josh Swan

I have had the opportunity this week to start working on an in house Ruby on Rails project. I am thrilled to doing more agile development that I can enjoy more. The last couple of years I have been doing a lot of Java work for companies that don’t practice a lot of agile techniques. I’m looking forward to the productivity of Rails again. While I am working on this project I plan on posting useful information that I learn or relearn along the way. Today I am going to explain how I setup my local BDD environment on my MacBook Pro OS X (Leopard) using Cucumber, RSpec, RCov, and “ZenTest”:http://www.zenspider.com/ZSS/Products/ZenTest/.

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It’s the Economy…..

April 14, 2009· by Tammy Adler

Each day I pick up the paper it seems like I learn about more companies laying off workers, cutting benefits or both.

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The Internet is Infected

April 1, 2009· by Eric Sorenson

Last Sunday I saw a segment on 60 Minutes about computer security, labeled “The Internet is Infected,” (available at: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4901282n). The spotlight was on Conficker, the bug of the week, but Lesley Stahl proceeded to give a pretty misguided overview of the subject of computer security in general. She left a gaping hole in her report by leaving out the fact that only Microsoft Windows operating systems can be infected by Conficker, and, of course, the same goes for nearly all other viruses, worms and malware. Instead of informing viewers of operating system options other than Windows, Lesley reports that the only way to protect yourself against digital theft is to buy expensive security software for Windows, while feigning skepticism of Symantec’s potential capitalist motivations by questioning their representative’s sincerity in touting the benefits of buying their products. It is patently untrue that purchasing anti-virus software is the only available option for protecting consumers’ computers, and she does her viewers a major disservice by insisting so; Mac OS X, BSD, and the multitude of Linux flavors do not need additional security software. Many major manufacturers preinstall these operating systems, making them readily available without any additional required action on the part of the consumer.

While Linux and BSD may be geared more towards the “geek” community, (with the possible exception of Ubuntu) Mac OS X is an excellent choice for the average consumer who is tired of dealing with a barrage of viruses and who doesn’t want to pay for expensive anti-virus software. The next time a major story is aired targeting computer security, and I’m sure it won’t be long until we see another one, I hope it will inform viewers about the full gamut of choices available to them, rather than airing what effectively amounts to an info-mercial for anti-virus software companies.

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Girls Aren’t Getting “IT”

March 31, 2009· by Kacie Conroy

Yesterday I worked at the LEAP (Learn Educate And Prosper) conference. It is a conference that aims to educate high school girls about their career options. The turn out of professionals from various industries was really great. The highlight was listening to Barbara Lawton speak. She had a very clear and inspiring message to deliver to the girls!

However, one thing that I didn’t find inspiring was the lack of knowledge about IT with the high school girls.

I run a program called GET IT (Girls Educating Themselves about Information Technology) that caters to middle school girl scout troops. At the beginning of each presentation I ask the girls if they have heard of any of the seven career paths we later discuss. I expect middle schoolers to be relatively unfamiliar with IT career paths. However, I was not expecting the high school LEAP conference attendees to have almost identical numbers to my typical 10 year old audience. With all the technology used by these young women, be it computers, or cell phones, I was really astounded at the numbers.

When I asked the LEAP attendees how many had heard of the term “IT” no one raised their hand. Zero. That is 0% out the 54 students who attended my presentation. Although there is a lot of work to be done there is a glimmer of hope. In each of my presentations I saw smiles and excitement during our BA role playing activity. I can say that were definitely some future BAs in there that now know about a really great career that they weren’t aware of before.

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