How Awesome is it to Work for Me?

WARNING! Gratuitous and shameless ego stroking below...

With my current employer, there are two formal events that call for an employee to comment on my performance as a boss: the end of their hiring probationary period, and their exit interview. Here's a collection of excerpts from both events - recorded by the human resources director and reported back to me - that keep me coming into the office day after day no matter how bad things get:

"Ted runs department smoothly"

"Likes that Ted is a manager but a developer too"

"He would recommend this as a place to work because of Ted"

"Likes the once per week meetings with Ted re[garding] the knowledge of the system"

"Thought Ted was the best in caliber and by far the most knowledgeable person he has every worked with/for" [I swear that's verbatim!]

"Liked when Ted moved on the floor – brought humor and direction" [referring to a time when I voluntarily left my comfy corner office to join my team in cubicle land]

"Said he preferred the B2B team – likes the structure of the B2B build – more cohesive and easier to work with" [referring to the time when I was running the B2B team while somebody else was running the B2C team]

Stupid .Net Tricks: Visual Studio and Subversion

This post isn't just another homage to my old friend's series of posts but also happens to involve him. How's that for irony? Or would it be serendipity? Whatever.

It just so happens that Craig has inherited an old project of mine and the first issue he ran into is one that I had to smash my face against about a year ago: Visual Studio hates Subversion.

Before Craig came to me, he went out and researched it on his own (Amen!) and discovered this thread, which pretty much sums it up. The .svn folders cause Visual Studio to barf.

The solution? As with most of the Windows projects I've worked on, a big fat ugly hack.

I have two working directories. One of them is a legitimate Subversion checkout, the other is just an export. What's the diff? Well, the former has the .svn files and the latter does not. So I point Visual Studio to the export version and use it for development, and when I need to commit my changes, I xcopy the export directory to the checkout directory. This copies just the modified files.

I do this so often I went ahead and threw it into a BATCH script:

@echo off
set SOURCE=C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\cyberdyne
set DESTINATION="C:\Documents and Settings\ted\Desktop\Cyberdyne\Subversion Working Copy"
xcopy %SOURCE% %DESTINATION% /d /e /v /r /y

Amusing anecdote: The order of the xcopy parameters "/d /e /v /r /y" is no coincidence, Devry is the name of the fine institution that Craig attended.

Please don't mug me

My mind was wandering this morning and it dawned on me that I carry a ridiculous wealth of electronics in my backpack when I travel:

+ Take.TV, 4GB, $100

+ DS Lite, $150 (with at least $100 in games)

+ PSP, $170 (with at least $100 in games)

+ iPod Nano, 4GB, 2nd gen., $250

+ Amazon Kindle, $400

+ Macbook Pro, 15", refurb. w/ram upgrade, $2500

Unless my math is wrong -- and keep in mind my degree is in music composition, so it's well withing the realm of likelihood -- that sums up to nearly $4,000, not accounting for depreciation.

Lest you get the wrong impression that I'm mister moneybags, all but the laptop were gifts.

Here's to hoping none of my faithful readers are tempted to mug me at the next convention.

Book Review: Dreaming in Code

I'm probably not the first (or the last) person to say Dreaming in Code is the Soul of a New Machine for my generation. The author chronicles the trials and tribulations of a fledgling start-up struggling to develop a piece of software that will change the world. Sound familiar? Yeah, that's pretty much the mission statement of every software start-up I've come across in the last decade and a half.

Unfortunately, these guys have it all messed up right out of the gate. Where most companies start out with a gung-ho entrepreneur and investors and profit expectations, this company starts out with a "socially responsible" "thought leader" philanthropist who has enough money from former successes (Lotus 1-2-3) to fund the venture himself and whose primary goals are to be open source and leverage peer to peer technology. The founder rounds up a few like-minded geniuses from his past endeavors and they start thinking about what to develop.

What happens when you get a bunch of "thinkers" in a room together? You have endless hours of thought-provoking intellectually-stimulating conversation and debates and draw lots of neat diagrams on the white board, hypothesizing solutions to the problems with software design which have have plagued the industry for decades... then you poke your head out of the conference room one day and realize a couple years have passed and you haven't written a single line of code. Been there, done that, have the worthless stock certificates framed and hanging on my office wall as a reminder of a hard-learned lesson.

The company eventually has to come to terms with developing and delivering software, meeting deadlines, making compromises, dealing with feature creep, and the whole gamut of "business as usual" debacles, and that's where things start to get interesting. But, sadly, the author's seemingly self-imposed three-year deadline for going to press came a lot sooner than the launch of the product he was chronicling. On an amusingly serendipitous note, the project in question popped into the news while I was writing this review. The article notes, "It's still very early beta, and there's a lot of polish missing from the current builds." So there's sadly no closure in the book.

Nevertheless, it's a good read. It starts strong, and the author peppers the biographical chapters with tangents on the philosophies of other big wigs in the software industry, trying to tie them all together into a sort of moral tale on how "software is hard" and we're doomed to never really master it. I don't agree with those sentiments, but he covers the topics well in an unbiased manner.

Quotables

In a tense meeting late last night, I had to stifle a laugh when the quality assurance director asked the president, "Which one do you want to control: requirements or delivery date? I control the other one."