Category: tech
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Lessons from a Successful Agile Project Part 1
For the last 9 months I've been working as part of the best project I've experienced in my career so far. The project has successfully delivered into production 5 times in the space of a year, with only 2 production bugs (each of which were fixed and deployed in less than a day). The real customers are happy due to the successful delivery (and relatively low total cost), and so are the project team due to being able to deliver successfully while keeping a sustainable pace and good team spirit throughout.
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Visual Studio Web Projects considered harmful
When you want to work on a web application in Visual Studio the default behaviour is to use a project that uses Frontpage server extensions. (Web applications include ASP.NET projects or Web Services.) There are big problems with this:
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Common Absolute Paths Anti-Pattern
Some projects I've worked on in the past assume that certain files can always be found at an absolute path, eg 'c:\program files\some cool library\library.dll'. Such files may be dependencies, or deployment target locations. This is a situation to be avoided!
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My XP 2004
A couple of weeks ago I was at XP 2004. Due to my goldfish-like memory I've already started forgetting what happened, but here's some things I do remember:
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Confluence - A Wiki on steroids
Those Atlassian boys have done it again. First I became a fan of Jira, and now its looking good for Confluence too.
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A bird turns into a fox (that's what I call evolution)
I've been using Mozilla Firebird as my browser for a while now. Its had (another) rename and is now called Firefox.
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Archive Quality MP3 Ripping
When I started using MP3 music files in 1998, the standard was to use 112 kbps encoding, which produced a notable loss of quality when played on speakers of any quality. One of the great things about the iPod, and the increasing size of hard disks generally, is that these days there's no point being so stingy about the quality of your MP3s.
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Handling Continuous Integration Failures
My blogging activity has been subdued recently. To try and remedy this I've decided to write some entries on build engineering, a subject I've looked at in some depth over the last few years.
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Nested Categories
I finally got around to adding nested category support, so now (for example) you can read all my tech entries, or just the build engineering ones. These things make me happy. :)
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Agile build engineering worthy of more research
I've spent the last 5 months on a build engineering engagement. Its been enjoyable, for the following reasons: