About the conference/trip This is my second year attending the soft-skills conference, Kalamazoo X. One of the things that drew me to this conference is that it deals with things that transcend any technology and any job at a certain company: the ability…
Professional Development – 2016 – Week 17
Dates covered: April 25-May 1, 2016 (week 17 of 52) Career 10 Rules of Professional Etiquette for the Digital Workplace (via Lifehacker) Hiring is Broken… And It Isn’t Worth Fixing (via Erik Dietrich) Computational science The Turing test: Can a computer pass…
Professional Development – 2016 – Week 16
Dates covered: April 18-24, 2016 (week 16 of 52) Career My Biggest Regret as a Programmer (via The Software Mentor) It’s Not Your Fault: The Role of Environment in Burnout (via Cameron Presley) Culture What US Software Companies Should Understand About The Rest…
May 2016 RPM Mix
Here are my RPM track lists for May 2016. The last time I taught RPM 68 was back in September 2015, and I’ve been wanting to bring back some of those tracks. On the last Sunday, I’ll be doing a 75-minute…
How to Be More Productive
This post is a summary of a Freakonomics Radio episode of the same name. Productivity means different things in different settings, and doesn’t just mean producing more widgets per hour. It’s about how to achieve your goals with less anxiety…
Professional Development – 2016 – Week 15
Dates covered: April 11-17, 2016 (week 15 of 52) Career Give Yourself Permission to Have Work-life Balance (via Scott Hanselman) How to Deal When You’re Overcommitted at Work (via Lifehacker) Becoming a Tech Lead: How I’ve Balanced Coding with Coaching (via Software Lead…
Professional Development – 2016 – Week 14
Dates covered: April 4-10, 2016 (week 14 of 52) Communication The Cost of Being Right (via Erik Dietrich) Culture Creative Confidence (via Software Lead Weekly) You Can Bring a Horse to Water… (via Software Lead Weekly) Why you should care about engineering…
Getting Code Review Statistics Programmatically from TFS
This post describes how to use LINQPad to query a Team Foundation Server (TFS) instance so that code review statistics can be collected. Context The project I work on for my employer has an external release cycle of six months….
RPM 70 Review
The Fort Sanders Health and Fitness Center’s RPM team just launched this on Tuesday (Apr 5), and I’ve had a chance to teach it a few times. Here’s my quarterly RPM review post giving some details and thoughts about the…
April 2016 RPM Mix
Here’s my RPM track list for April 2016. We launched this release on April 5, and we are asked by management to stick with the new release for 3 weeks, so I’ll likely keep these tracks until the end of the…