Mike Monteiro on Contracts: Fuck You. Pay Me.

Mule Design Studio co-founder Mike Monteiro leads a poignant and gratuitously profane talk on the importance of contracts and legal representation for freelancers and consultants. His perspective is–not surprisingly–that of a designer, but his message aptly transcends disciplines. If you've ever worked without a contract, inked a client agreement sans second thought, or wondered exactly how to deal with that asshole that can never seem to find his checkbook, you absolutely MUST see this.



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The Singularity is Coming (on Monday)

In case you didn’t know, Monday is a seminal day for computer science. It’s an event as as important as Newton’s publishing of the Principia in 1687, development of the integrated circuit in the 1940's, or the launch of ARPANet in 1969.

Why? On Monday, IBM’s massively parallel computing cluster, christened “Waston” in honor of company pioneer Thomas Watson, will compete on Merv Griffin’s long running Jeopardy! quiz show. Not impressed? You should be...

Ten Best and Worst of 2010

This past year, it turns out, was a pretty good year for software peeps. Despite a spiraling economy, political infighting, and the widespread cutting of corporate budgets, experienced developers have remained in steady demand. The old adage about the good people always working holds true, but it's a bit of a relief to see it pass the test of practical application. And despite all of the bad news we've encountered over the past twelve months there's also been a healthy amount of good, including some profound, continued innovation in our field and beyond. This has, for some reason, inspired me to reflect back on what I found to be the best and worst in 2010.

WordPress on IIS7 Revisited

A week of up-time on IIS7 has given me some time to really dig in and asses the feasibility of WordPress on a Windows hosting platform. I was particularly interested in testing compatibility of the two, but I also wanted to gauge the performance of the new PHP pipeline in IIS7.

I was pretty impressed with the speed of PHP on IIS7, and setup was painless. Sure there were none of the Apache modules that have become so ubiquitous and configuration was a bit different, but there had to be workarounds. And while I suspect that most PHP applications could be coaxed to run perfectly on an IIS7 box, my final conclusion was that WordPress and IIS just aren't a good match.

Fun with URL Rewriting, WordPress, and IIS7

Aside from wrapping my export routine in a WordPress friendly plugin, accurately transforming the URLs from my Community Server website has been the most time-consuming part of the Community Server to WordPress migration. A domain name change further complicated things, quickly devolving URL rewriting into a non-trivial endeavor.

Keep in mind, however, that how you ultimately handle URL rewriting depends largely on where you are relocating to, and how you plan to get there. For example, if you've decided to make the switch to an Apache-based hosting solution, your options will be much different that moving to an IIS-based one.

Migrating a Community Server Blog to WordPress

If you've noticed that something looks markedly different here, then you're right. I recently made the descision to migrate my blogging back-end from Community Server to WordPress and, well, I couldn't be happier.

That's not to say that Community Server is a bad product; it's not. Community Server is a very powerful, enterprise-class collaboration platform -- somewhat akin to Sharepoint -- with a blog engine thrown into the mix. This makes it incredibly complex, both to install and to manage, a far cry from the no-touch, blog-only deployment of its DotText predecessor. This complexity, combined with a very small online support community, have made Community Server a less than perfect choice for those needing a simple blogging platform.

Atlanta SCRUM User's Group Formed

There's been a marked increase in the affinity for Agile development methodologies over the past few years, and the southeast is no exception. The number of project leaders seeking resources with bone-fide Agile experience seems to at least on-par with those looking for heavyweight contenders, and for good reason: done correctly, Agile works.

That's not to say that ubiquity is a panacea. First and foremost, lightweight methodologies aren't the right fit for every situation. And even when they are, adoption is isn't without it's challenges. Many of the shops I've visited around town recently are struggling with implementations of XP or SCRUM -- think changing the tire on a moving dumptruck while you're reading the service manual, and trying to convince the driver a replacement is necessary, all at the same time.

Parsing Delimited Strings Using Generics

Though not particularly sexy, parsing a delimited string is a pretty common programming task. And while it's not difficult to build a couple of simple functions to slice and dice this type of data, you often find yourself duplicating this functionality to accommodate multiple return types. Add to this the fact that .NET doesn't support overloading by return type only, and you'll eventually end up with a mess of nearly identical, yet seemingly disconnected logic.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just write one function that would automatically process your string, and return a list of objects typed exactly how you want? Thanks to generics, you can.