I've always wanted a blog. I've read so many over the years that have helped me as a developer I figured I might as well try to participate as well. I realize it will be a long time until any (if ever) reads this. It's nice to think they would, but if not, hey, It's for my own sanity.
The basics. I work for a large company that shall remain nameless in Chicago, good people. MASSIVE development team. Much larger than anything I have ever worked with and we are masters of documentation. Many of us joke about how much of a waterfall approach it is, even though we try to implement little agile methodologies such as continuous integration, unit testing, integration testing, and recently getting into mock objects. However releases are many months apart, and most of the time in a release is spent documenting and having meetings. Given the nature of our business, I see that as important, and we are trying to find a good approach to giving the old guard what they want, while trying to adopt more agile methods to give users what they are demanding.
We suffer from the same things many others do, system that was converted over from a good legacy system which would have been just fine if they had gone ASP -> ASP.NET. But alas, no. Some crazy architect (also to remain nameless) wanted to make it all enterprisey by creating his vision of transcendent/super pluggable framework software. You know, the software that is perfect for any application and can scale, yada yada. That sales pitch you almost dread, well this is the end result of that sales pitch. I will say that I applaud the creators effort as I think it is academically brilliant, and I'm impressed by how he put it together. But it creates unnecessary overhead and his definition of loose coupling was "everything is a dataset" ;)
I'm not complaining, I just find it comical. I also find it challenging, although in a way I didn't expect. The challenge isn't delivering code, it is making sure you understand how data transforms the many layers that exist in the infrastructure. Plus, it's a massive amount of data to analyze which can be exciting (at least I think so). Plus it pays great and is strict on 40 hours so I can go home and spend time with my wife.
This blog isn't about that though, however I may relate some work experiences. No, this is more about my open source work that I've recently jumped into. I've actually been using open source software for quite some time (I've used DotNetNuke extensivly for the past 4 years) and with it have built some pretty cool stuff.
I've joined the DNN Announcements module development team which I am very excited to get to participate on such a great level with DNN. We've got some good people on the team right now and actually a pretty good size for a open source module. Plus we have people from the US, Netherlands, and I believe Spain. I probably have that wrong, but I know its a pretty spread team.
I've also created a couple projects on CodePlex that I work on in my spare time. One sharing the name of this blog - YakShaver.NET - which is an exploration at integration testing, unit testing, windows workflow, TFS API, CodePlex API, DNN Forge API, a number of help desk applications as well as going to a knowledge base and more. Basically I want to look at software builds by looking at the life of a work item from start to finish (when does it need to be one? When is it a support item? how do we keep people involved? ) I'm really hoping to use this in combination with the DNN development. The project Wiki goes over the goals of the project. The other is DeliveryBoy. Which I will comment on as well, but probably not for awhile. I started that project looking for something to do, but then I was reading a book and wanted to do some YakShaving (Building tools for tools, could be considered a useful task, but not always necessary). I'm hoping people find it necessary.
That's it for now, I just finished my first integration tests for Windows Workflow and will post the results if I wasn't so tired and had to go to work early tomorrow. This weekend though.
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