Fast Company has a good article this month called The Art of Work. The article is about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's study into what he calls "flow". What is flow? Mihaly describes flow this way: "It is what the sailor holding a tight course feels when the wind whips through her hair....It is what a painter feels when the colors on the canvas...

I had a group of blog source files get their date time stamps reset tonight. I think I restored it all from a backup and reset the date time with the touch command, but if your blog aggreator thinks I'm spamming you, I aplogize. :( FYI, I had a Linux box behaving strangely so I bounced it. Apparently the OS hadn't run flushed the disk buffers...

If you've used MySql before, this is just tribal knowledge, but if you're trying out Rails for the first time, you might encounter this. I know two people who encountered the situation this week, so I'm posting it here. MySql has all networking turned off by default. This is a security measure that makes your MySql much safer from network...

We recieved a question from Jerome about how Continuous Integration works in the real world. Regarding 'Continuous Integration' : building our application takes about than half an hour. Your book mention that after each commit, the Continuous integration system should start a build to make sure the commit didn't break it. I wished your book...

A co-worker of mine (Susan Bartholow) mentioned a neat feature in MBUnit today and I thought it was share-worthy. :) First, what is MBUnit? MBUnit is a .NET testing framework. You can use it for testing any of the .NET family of languages. C#, VB, etc. Here's a short tutorial. Remember, a testing framework with "unit" in the name isn't just...

I heard Andy Hunt speak tonight on "Refactoring Your Wetware at the Triangle .NET User Group. Here's the blurb on Andy's talk: The raw material of software development is not a language, and IDE, or a tool, it's you. How we learn new technology and acquire new skills is key to our careers. Join Andy Hunt for a presentation that includes The...

I got an email today asking me to help out a friend having trouble with TortoiseSVN. Apparently it has trouble co-existing with Symantec's Internet Security 2005. The pre-existing Symantec tool won't start once Tortoise is installed. In poking around to find another SVN client for my friend, I stumbled across RapidSVN. It's hosted by the good...

Will and I had a great time at JavaRanch last week. We spent time in the Process forum. This week Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter will be in the Java in General forum discussing their new book Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases. If you visit the forum and participate you'll be entered in a drawing for a free copy of their new book. Jared

Twice in the last week I've been asked about the experience of writing a book for the Pragmatic Programmers. Since I've been meaning to blog on this topic for some time, I decided it must be time to actually sit down and do it. :) This thread on Java Ranch is a good place to start. In part it says: From what I've seen most of the authors either...

I saw blog entry on Graham's Glass's site this weekend. He's got a link to what he calls "the most complicated photo ever" and I think I agree with him. Check out the link if you've got a moment to be amazed.

I have unwittingly offended one of our readers and I must apologize. When I first saw David Starr's review of Ship It!, I was quite pleased. He seemed to really like the book and enjoyed what we had to say. I was especially fond of the parts of the review like if you are a Development Team Lead or a Development Manager, you should be fired if...

The topic of a team's Bus Number (or Truck Number) has come up three times in the last two days, so I'm carting it out here. Taken from Ship It! (page 115): Raise Your Bus Number Your bus number is the number of developers you’d have to lose to disable your project. Whether they quit or get hit by the proverbial bus, losing this many people...

Starting this evening Will and I will be chatting about Ship It! over at JavaRanch this week. If you've got questions or just want to see what everyone else's questions are, or you just want to heckle, drop on by! :) JavaRanch is a great community of Java developers and well worth a visit. The forums are very active with everyone from beginners...

I asked people to send in their favorite key practice with the promise of free t-shirts! :) Continuous Integration was the practice most often picked, even by people who aren't using it yet. Apparently it's pretty easy to see the benefit even if you aren't fortunate enough to be working in a CI environment every day. Without further ado, here...

Our book Ship it! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects is published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf. Traditionally the Prag Prog team have kept all their books at the listed retail price on their web site. Then online stores like Amazon.com sell the book for 30 to 35% off the retail price. This means our book costs $20 on Amazon.com and...