Dashcam Timelapse

Making a timelapse video has never been easier.
Enjoy this 50 minute journey.

Pointless forwards

Emails : A preferred medium of communication in large enterprises where the teams are spread across different time zones and geographies.

Email groups : A natural response for creating a single source for communicating information to multiple people.

Nesting of email groups : An email group can be part of another email group. Advantage : Easy to send information. Disadvantage: Easy to send anything to multiple people.

I am part of an email group called "Product A", There is another group called "Product B". At some point of time, "Product B" group was expanded to include "Product A". Advantage : I get all the updates automatically sent to the "Product B" group. Disadvantage: There is one person on my team who religiously forwards all relevant emails sent to "Product B" to the "Product A" emails.

Now I receive all those emails twice and I had to resort to setting up a rule in my outlook to delete the second copy as soon as it arrives.

Conway's Life

I decided to write the 'Game of Life' in C#, Here's a video of the final output

Acceptance Test Driven Development

Acceptance Test Driven Development 

It feels just natural that you would want to do ATDD.

After all, wouldn't you want to validate the implementation against the original requirement. Very logical. Unfortunately a lot of 'Testers' in the software industry are of the opinion that you cannot do anything unless the implementation is complete. For such people, ATDD is not only un-natural but outright bizarre.

The 'Developers' try and work around this problem by having more and more tests at the 'unit' level. That's their natural response. This, unfortunately, ends up with a situation where there is not enough acceptance tests coverage against the original specification. Lack of tests mean that the implementation gaps (as opposed to bugs) are discovered nearer the release

This has a potential of having a robust product but still not meeting the end user goal.

Close but no cigar!!

Definition of Done - Learning from a child

As the software development community has embraced agile, Lot of them have adopted scrum as their preferred practice. One of the artifacts of scrum is a 'Definition of Done'. It is quite an important artifact which has a potential to hugely affect the quality of the product.

In last few days, I got a lesson in why it is important to have a proper "Definition of Done" from my 5 year old son.

It so happened that we were getting ready for school in the morning. About 10 minutes before we were to leave, the following conversation happened:

Son : Dad, Can I watch 'Tweenies' on the telly?
Me : You can, for 5 minutes, only if you are fully ready.
Son : Okay dad.

After 5 minutes when we were to leave, I noticed that my son was not wearing any shoes, neither did he have any jacket on and his socks were still drying. Nevertheless, rest of the school uniform was on. I made him realise that 'fully ready' included wearing socks and shoes as well.

Next day,
Son : Dad, Can I watch 'Tweenies' on the telly?
Me : You can, for 5 minutes, only if you are fully ready.
Son : Okay dad, I am. I am wering my shoes too.

After 5 minutes when we were to leave, the school bag did not have the stuff needed for that day...

These 2 examples meant that we either 'delivered' my son to school LATE or in a haste with some RISKY driving along the road or WITHOUT the requisite stuff.

Calmly thinking about this, it gave me a nice insight into why 'Definition of Done' is so important. If it is left to interpretation, we might deliver the software to the market -- either LATE, or AT INCREASED RISK or WITHOUT NEEDED QUALITY.

Though we were late to school, I learnt an invluable lessons about scrum from my son.

NHS

National Health Service : One of the best services offered within the UK, however you need to be dying to be seen be a doctor.

If you are not dying, please do not expect the NHS to help you.

Microsoft hatred

I am yet to meet a person who has said good things about open source technologies without saying bad things about Microsoft.

Whether it is JAVA, Firefox or anything else, they have to say bad things about Microsoft to justify their point.

I had recently attended a Lean training from a reputed organisation, however the trainer (ex-IBM) there also could not complete his training without talking anti-microsoft.

Coding Standards and Line Length

I'll have to admit, I am from dinosaur age when it comes to computers. My first experince of programming BASIC in 1988 was on a VDU (was the term 'monitor' not that popular then?) which had 24 lines by 80 characters.

More than 20 years since that time, I find some people still having 80 character line limit in their coding standards, what a shame that technology has failed to convert the geeks :)