Adventuring On

As you may already know, my last day with STG will be Feb 21st. This was a big decision for me that is probably surprising considering how much I have loved working here.

Software Technology Group

I have nothing but praise for STG. If you aren't aware, STG is a local contracting/consulting firm. Despite the challenges of the distributed workplace, I always felt like an STG employee rather than an employee of my client. The office staff puts a lot of effort into successfully making consultants feel like a valued member of a larger team. They reinvest in their employees through in-house training, conferences, shared technical resources, evenings out with your spouse, family activities, etc. STG provides a lot of opportunities of developers who like to experience new work environments and challenging problems in their work as contractors, but want the safety of a regular pay check and great benefits. I can't emphasize enough how well STG has treated me while I have been there. If this is at all what you want to do with your career, it is worth your time to meet with STG.

HealthCare Insight / Verisk Health

I have been working with HCI for the last 18 months. It has been quite an adventure. I am sad that I won't be seeing firsthand the next phase of development with this team. As a team, we have been coached on Scrum. We survived a difficult death march. We experienced a complete change in management. We started a weekly developer forum in which we discuss topics from testing to clean pragmatic code to structuring CSS for flexibility and maintenance. We have gotten serious about automated testing; TDD/unit testing, UI testing with Selenium, acceptance testing with FitNesse and even JavaScript testing with Jasmine. We have moved from raw ADO.NET to the NHibernate ORM. We have introduced the Model View Presenter (Passive View) pattern to our web application in order to reduce coupling and enhance testability. We have started using the ASP.NET MVC 3 framework. All told, this team has made more positive change in the last year and a half than I would have suspected any team could. It amazes me to see how far we have come. I can't wait to hear where they go next. (In case you are looking, there are a couple of openings on this team for strong, passionate developers.)

Pluralsight

So given all of the praise I have for both STG and HCI, why in the world am I leaving, you ask? The answer is pretty simple really. As you probably know if you read this blog or run into me at user groups or conferences, I am very passionate about software development. I strongly believe that the best way to get both internal and external quality in your application is to work with a team of developers who are passionate about the work they do and are constantly trying to improve themselves and the code around them. For a while now, I have wanted to get into training and coaching so that I can share the true joy of programming with other developers. Pluralsight provides this very service in a way that is readily accessible to a large number of developers and is a natural fit for my passion. I will be the 5th member of the internal development team that provides the infrastructure to deliver content from presenters/authors into the hands of developers worldwide. Not only is Pluralsight a company that provides training for other developers, but the internal team is a group of smart aspiring craftsmen who implement what we provide. I am excited that I will be playing catch up on the multiple fronts as I am introduced to new tools and techniques that my team is implementing and creating. I will share more of this later as I come up to speed, but if you want a preview, check out Keith's blog. <Shameless plug>If your company relies on custom software for any critical business processes, why not have them sign up for a group membership?</Shameless plug>

Comments

  1. MarkFebruary 8, 2012 at 9:26 AM

    I hope you enjoy you slight career change.

    I want you to know that I consider you one of my coding mentors, so I think you're making a great move in sort of formalizing it!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Tim SchreiberFebruary 8, 2012 at 9:15 PM

    Please accept both my congratulations on your new endeavor :) and my condemnation for leaving STG :(

    ReplyDelete

New comments are not allowed.

Popular posts from this blog

TFS to SVN Conversion with History

Recently, the team I was on wanted to move our source code from Team Foundation Server to SVN for reasons that had almost nothing to do with source control directly. This would be a pretty simple operation, but we didn't want to lose access to the history when the operations team turned off the machine running TFS. We couldn't find any direct paths for moving history from TFS to SVN, so instead we chose to use git as an intermediary. Here's how we did it: Step 1 - Install the tools Install msysgit: http://code.google.com/p/msysgit/ Install git-tfs: https://github.com/git-tfs/git-tfs Step 2 - Pull TFS history to local git repository git tfs clone <tfs-project-url> "$/<tfs-project-name>/<tfs-project-folder>" <localfolder> example: git tfs clone http://tfs-001:8080/tfs/projectroot "$/Reference Architecture/ReferenceArchitecture" RefArch Step 3 - Initialize git-svn * User Lower Case - Caps will make it fail! * Change direc...
Read more

Simpler Tests: What kind of test are you writing?

One common problem that I see in test suites is confusion about what each test should cover. This confusion often leads to tests that are either too broad or too focused to accomplish the goal of the author. When writing a test, it is important to think about what kind of test it will be and the constraints that make that type of test effective. There are a few broad categories of tests that I keep in mind to help focus my testing: Unit Tests Also called micro tests, unit tests form the foundation of any good testing strategy. These are tests that test a single class or method in isolation from it's dependencies. Mocks and stubs help us isolate the code under test and make our tests more focused and expressive. A test that touches any external resource such as the database, the file system, a web service, etc is never a unit test. The primary purpose of unit tests is to validate that the subject under test is functionally correct for the expected inputs and outputs. Additiona...
Read more

Architecture at different levels of abstraction

Image
This week I am attending the O'Reilly Architecture Conference in NYC with my team and I had the pleasure of attending a two day training on Building Evolutionary Architectures presented by Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons . During this session, on of the things we talked about extensively was coupling. We looked at dependency maps for different architectural styles including the big ball of mud . We saw something like the following and almost everyone agreed, "That is a bad architecture." Big Ball of Mud This reminded me of something I has seen elsewhere before, and after a quick search, I found it: Amazon and Netflix Death Star Architectures The ball of mud is considered obviously wrong by most architects, but the death star seems to be held up as an ideal by just as many and likely most of the same architects. Why is this? Are afferent coupling (inbound dependencies) and efferent coupling (outreaching dependencies) only important at a certain sc...
Read more