I am now the proud owner of geekwith.me!
I have a huge collection of links to geek cuture, communities, blogs, and quick reference material (and some of my own material) on my private wiki. I was going to move it over to thekramers.net, but now I must put it on geekwith.me.
One of the many ways in which I am weird is that I love pair programming (two Software Engineers working together on the same computer). I’m a social animal, and I have the self-confidence to appreciate corrections couched as constructive criticism. But many Software engineers hate it because they feel they’re being judged constantly. And of course a lot of Software Engineers are introverts or have poor social skills. Or just like a little breathing room.
At my last company, I was instrumental at rolling out Agile on selected projects (because I believe in using the right tools for the job, and because Agile was not right for every project). My current employer, alas, is nowhere near ready for Agile. We’re trying to make some major changes to a product that affect the Flex front end, the Java back end, the XML and XSLT documents that hold and transform some of the data, and the databases. All those components need to dance together, or someone’s toes are going to get stepped on. But there’s no one person with all those skills, and certainly not enough time for one resource to do it all.
So here’s what we’ve been doing; My partner in crime (let’s call him E. He hates that.) and I are working physically side by side, but not together on the same thing. While E’s flexing the Flex and pouring the Java it talks to, I’m torturing the data till it sings, and pouring the Java that manages the data. But when either of us has a question on how something should be working (E may have questions about what’s in the data to help determine the expected results, or I may have questions on how a particular query is formed or the results processed), we’re right there to point at things on our screen. The fact that we’re working on two different computers isn’t a problem because we’re both syncing regularly with the version control system.
Clearly this is not pair programming, because we’re both working on different things most of the time. But there’s something different going on than if we were both sitting in our own desks. The barriers to communication are very low, and we can point out stuff right on our screens because they are next to each other. It’s a great balance of supporting each other while still doing our own thing. I don’t know if there’s a real name for what we were doing, so I decided to call it Co-Programming.
| This poster is great for both the newbie building his or her first FrankenComputer and the seasoned geek doing an autopsy on some ancient box from days gone by.
Click on the poster to go to the source website. |
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Red Hat (RHAT) is to be included in the Standard and Poor’s 500 Index next week!!! That’s just so cool. While I switched to Ubuntu a while ago myself, Red Hat is a great company with great products, and they contribute very heavily to the Linux kernel, drivers, and software.
| woot.com, the online geek store phenomenon that sells one item each day, turned 5 last Sunday.
This is one of the more fun way to get deals on the InterTubes. [almost] every day, at 12:00CST, they put up a new item for sale, and sell that one item until they run out, or 12:00CST the next day. There’s a lively discussion forum to discuss the products among the other wooters. Another great thing about woot is they write very funny descriptions of the products. Every now and again, there’s a woot-off, where they sell a bunch of things in rapid succession, and deprive geeks worldwide of much-needed sleep and focus at work. I’ve bought several things there, and have always been happy with them. Just be aware that their cheap shipping is VERY slow. |
Mortimer & Monte: In the Break Room from Woot Video on Vimeo. |
From Wired: 100 Essential Skills for Geeks.
I found this list fun, but a lot of the skills on their list are either too esoteric for even a mid-level geek (lock picking, bypassing passwords), or to specific to be be general geek knowledge (steganographics, robotics). But it is fun.
I’ll update this post tonight with my score. I welcome comments with yours.