TimShadel.com

This morning I got an email from Backpack, telling me that my business partner added a new page with some meeting minutes from our late night conversation the other day. I clicked the link, reviewed the page, and quickly rushed off a reply to his email saying that it looked good. Then I noticed it. [...]

The Bear and Friends have a way to speak truth. Just before heading to the doctor this morning, my wife put on The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh for our son. It’s been years since I’ve seen this, and my ear caught something of it while it played in the background. Pooh has eaten [...]

I’ve been a fan of David Allen‘s GTD book and Merlin Mann’s 43folders site for a long time. I go through waves of dedicated times and waves of lax times. Inspired a few weeks ago by Merlin’s recent Google talk, I tackled my home inbox and won: Now I just need to do something about [...]

Jim Shore’s recently made some observations about projects and products, James Shore: Successful Software. Rather than thinking in terms of projects, I’ve come to prefer thinking about products and releases. Rather than talking about the project I’m working on and the tasks it involves, I’ll talk about the product and how it’s valuable. Rather than [...]

I gave a presentation tonight on JBoss Rules to the Phoenix JUG. There was a good group of people there, and we had a very lively discussion around some of the strengths and weaknesses of rules engines in general. It was fun to cover a topic that I don’t hear much of (outside of sales [...]

Kaizen and Juice 2.0 – Juice Analytics We built the new site using Python and Django. I really like the Juice Analytics blog. These guys know their stuff when it comes to business analytics and data information display. They know all the big names, all the new tools, and they’ve got their own tips on [...]

I don’t know how many years I’ve used the following command chain to add all my unknown files to Subversion: svn st | grep ? | sed -e “s/? *//” | xargs svn add Inevitably I occasionally end up using that string on some directory where I have a space in the pathname, and everything [...]

Mike Clark is wondering: Which RubyGems are you sporting? So my current list is down below. I imagine it will change soon — maybe tomorrow. gem list | grep “^[a-zA-Z]” actionmailer (1.3.2, 1.3.1, 1.2.5) actionpack (1.13.2, 1.13.1, 1.12.5) actionwebservice (1.2.2, 1.2.1, 1.1.6) activerecord (1.15.2, 1.15.1, 1.14.4) activesupport (1.4.1, 1.4.0, 1.3.1) aws-s3 (0.3.0, 0.2.0) BlueCloth (1.0.0) [...]

Download winstone from it’s Sourceforge Files page Download the Hudson war file from its Java.net Release page Then run java -jar winstone-0.9.6.jar –warfile=hudson.war –httpPort=8081 You should see something like the screenshot below. Play. One of my favorite features of Hudson is the ability to watch the console output of a build in progress, like this [...]

Tonight we’ll be deploying the first beta of a major new feature of our product that my team’s been working on since September. Don’t get me wrong, we’ve release updates to our product every two weeks. Our branching strategy is such that we have one month cycles on /trunk that branch on release, and are [...]

This is why JSF’s “everything-is-a-POST” approach is bad, but first let me give a bit of background information. I’m a Harry Potter fan. I like the books. I like the occasional conversation. I ususally keep my enthusiasm centered around new arrivals of a book or movie. A while back, my mom and I were talking [...]

I’ve just started one on one meetings with my new team. I’ve read about them in Behind Closed Doors, and I’ve seen the success that Ed Gibbs has had with them, so I finally decided to jump in. I did the first round a couple weeks ago, and then got to “busy” to keep them [...]

I pulled the following essay out of a report my business partner and I did for a client a little bit back. I think it’s got a wide range of application to numerous business areas. It’s a list of things I feel are vital to strategic management of IT departments. I’ve worked in places that [...]

So I turned off my CSS today. Here’s the party line: To know more about why styles are disabled on this website visit the Annual CSS Naked Day website for more information. This is kinda cool, since I prefer to work with sites that focus their HTML design around their information. This site’s HTML is [...]

This was a wonderous site to see, and one a long time coming. After long months of working to build a sense of importance for the build, we finally got every one of our 199 projects in CruiseControl to build successfully. Good work team. One obstacle we faced along the way was knowing exactly how [...]

I like to challenge barriers. I think part of it is that I’ve had so many of my own challenged and under scrutiny, they fell. That opened up worlds hitherto unexplored. Design is like that. Many people hold to current limitations or artificial constraints that bolster the status quo. Challenging those assumptions almost always leads [...]

I’ve had my head down on a project for the last few months — thus the silence. Martin Fowler’s recent note about Anecdotal Evidence brought me out of it. MF Bliki: AnecdotalEvidence Some people would extend this – saying you can’t really talk about an idea until you’ve seen it on multiple projects. While this [...]

We’ve been doing a bit of research lately on the “Buy vs. Build” argument in application development. As a survey of what’s out there, one of my colleagues collected a number of articles on the issue. Many of these are on the web, so you can check out his Furl archive in the “Buy vs. [...]

It looks like Matt Raible was writing about making it easy to upgrade your Eclipse installation a couple of days before I was. His post has about the same info as mine, but many more comments. Check it out and see what other people are saying on the subject.

I just finished my first real code review cycle using Jupiter, and I’m quite happy, to say the least. It’s quickly becoming something I don’t want to be without on any future project. Let me back up. Everyone learns in Software Engineering 101 that code reviews are an excellent way to remove defects from your [...]