This past Monday, OSC had a company hackathon day. It is not our first, but we have been trying to make this sort of activity a more regular thing for us. Unlike our previous hackathons, this one was more flexible on the rules. Previously we had the entire team work [...]
Earlier this year in my MSMIT classes at UVa, we talked about software estimation techniques, which was a very interesting topic.
One thing we talked about was the “Cone of Uncertainty”, as described in Steve McConnell’s book “Rapid Development.” You can read the full description of the cone of uncertainty [...]
Three OSCiers attended DevDays DC and for a one day show there were some interesting moments and quite a bit of information to be absorbed.
The conference started with a funny clip by the people at Fog Creek and had a nice lineup of speakers.
You can find my notes [...]
So, is James Bach (@jamesmarcusbach) the bad boy of testing?
I flew up to Boston on Monday to lead some workshops on Continuous Integration. I checked into my room at the Hyatt and then went downstairs to see who was around. I ran into a couple of speakers [...]
From the Meetup site:
We’ll look at the thriving Ruby ecosystem that has grown up around integrating with Solr. From Ruby gems that integrate with Solr like solrb and rsolr, to general search solutions like acts_as_solr and sunspot. We’ll also look at a complete “shrink wrapped” catalog solution for Solr [...]
As many of you know, I am a disabled veteran, but I was fortunate in that my injuries were very minor, particularly compared to what many of our Wounded Warriors go through on a regular basis. OpenSource Connections is a sponsor of the November 7 American Freedom Festival, presented by [...]
There is a true story behind this odd ensemble of a title. I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact, it was yesterday…..
The Story.
I was packing up my laptop when I was abruptly cornered by an energetic fellow. He rattled off his problem in such a degree I could only [...]
Why do we need to sell Agile?
For those of us who know and love Agile, the benefits of Agile seem obvious. It can be frustrating when someone doesn’t inherently see those benefits, and we sometimes forget that we need to sell our clients or our managers on our process.
For some [...]
I’m very pleased to be speaking to Richmond SPIN (Software Process Improvement Network) next Wednesday October 14th, at 6:00 pm at Anthem BCBS in Richmond. The address is 2015 Staples Mill Road in Richmond. You can find more details and register online at:
Here’s the brief on my talk, which [...]
I personally like to keep up to date with technologies and use the latest and greatest of what’s available. Not everyone is the same though, and it is not always a possibility. In my case, using the latest version of PHP at the moment (PHP 5.3.0) means not being able [...]
The EdUI Conference is a new conference held by the University of Virginia for the niche of web professionals in higher education. Do not let the tag line fool you. A good portion, if not all information, provided by on-the-front-lines professionals easily translates into other [...]
Arin Sime’s presentation last week at Agile 2009 on how to sell a traditional client on an agile plan made a good impression, apparently. First, his presentation was featured on the front page of SlideShare.
Now, he’s received an excellent writeup from [...]
When: August 25, 2009 from 12:00pm - 1:00pm
Where: Michie North Building Room 324 across from Barracks shopping center.
RJ Bruneel will show his Stock Watch Flex app which uses Google Finance for customers to be able to watch their stock portfolios.
For more information about the meeting: [groups.adobe.com]
For more information about [...]
OSC is proud to announce that we will attend and sponsor this year’s EdUI Conference 2009 which is bein held at the University of Virginia on 21st-22nd September 2009. A number of folks from the OSC team will be attending, and stop by our [...]
I am very proud to annouce the first book on Solr has been published by Packt. This has been a labor of love for myself and my co-author David Smiley, and we are excited to see the book [...]
Today, the United States Marine Corps announced that it was banning its Marines from using social networking on the job. Citing security risks, the Marine Corps has said that it will block and ban social network sites while Marines are on the job, but doesn’t [...]
This fall I will present at the following events:
October 3rd - Richmong Code Camp October 8th - Roanoke Valley .NET User Group October 15th - Charlottesville .NET User GroupHope to see y’all there. Thank You
[...]Last night I had the pleasure of presenting ASP.NET Dynamic Data to the Richmond Software Craftmanship Group. Dynamic Data is a rich scaffolding framework that instantly web enables a database. As you might expect, it creates a database centric website. That was my first demo. My second demo showed [...]
Scott Ambler wrote a very interesting article for Dr Dobbs Journal recently entitled “RFPs the Agile Way — or — Fear and Loathing in the Procurement Department.” I first came across the article when Deborah Hartman Preuss wrote an excellent commentary on InfoQ about Scott’s article, entitled “Using the [...]
I’m very pleased to be co-speaking with Wayne Graham at EdUI 2009 at the University of Virginia this September 22nd. EdUI 2009 posted the full conference schedule today, which included the talk Wayne and I will give. Here’s the description for our talk:
Last Thursday I had a great opportunity to speak at AgileCville, and give a dry run of my upcoming presentation at Agile 2009.
Eric took this photo of me speaking. It looks like I’m doing The Robot. I’m not, but that would have been [...]
Working at a small company like OSC allows for group bonding “work” activities such as RailsRumble, which create a good working environment and helps develop our skills. If you don’t know what RailsRumble is, it’s a competition where teams of 1 up to 4 members develop a Ruby on [...]
You might be aware of it’s existence, even if only on a subconscience level. It might even be a scary thought that Software Cults exist or worse that you could be a part of one. Whether it’s political, social, religious or even software related, people tend to cling to their [...]
To celebrate my one year in the “real world”, I went to Toronto to attend the FutureRuby conference. The format of the conference is consistent with all other conferences I’ve been to, the unConference with an unThink style of philosophy. This was also my second Ruby specific conference, and the [...]
I’ll be speaking to this Thursday’s #agilecville group meeting, about “How to sell a traditional client on an Agile project plan.” I have 11 strategies that I will go over for how to convince your clients that Agile methodologies are the way to go, and I [...]
Well … famous in one room of a conference at least.
I just posted a google form survey looking for feedback on how people are “selling” the use of Agile in their companies and with their clients. You can see the survey and fill it out here:
I will be using [...]
In prepping for tomorrow’s presentation on Social Media for the Shenandoah Ruby Users Group, Jennifer Till asked me where else we were going to be appearing at. I feel like a concert promoter who’s failed to promote his band’s concerts. We [...]
Last week I finished Module 1 of the UVa McIntire School of Commerce grad school program I’m in, for an MS in Management of Information Technology. It was a great 2 weeks, and a lot of fun and hard work.
I’ll be presenting the CBS19 Blog of the Week next Tuesday, June 9. If you want to watch it live, I’ll be appearing between 6:30 and 7:00 PM, and you can also watch it streaming on [www.charlottesvillenewsplex.tv]. Fans of Marijean Jaggers need fear not, for she’ll be [...]
On May 21, 2009 at the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council annual awards dinner, Arin Sime of OpenSource Connections was awarded the CBIC Leadership Award for demonstrating “exemplary leadership and [contributing] most significantly toward the organization’s mission.” Arin [...]
At OSC, we have a well developed methodology that we apply to our client work, and one of the core tenets is using Continuous Integration to ensure our code behaves the way we intend it to.
However, recently we’ve had two projects were the usual CI solutions such as CruiseControl [...]
I don’t normally post blog articles that are reposts of other content, but this email thread answered a question that I’ve struggled with, which is how do you render a web page and save it as an image. I do this on HighTechCville, and our Fish4Brains RailsRumble entry a [...]
This past weekend was my first as a graduate student at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce, where I am working on a Masters degree in Management of Information Technology. It was a great 3 days of intensive classes on IT strategy, and I really enjoyed [...]
Have you ever tried to make two technologies working together? Has it worked well for you? Was it easy, out of the box type of task that took you about an hour to complete? Or was a week long thing, and you got out of it with less hair? If [...]
I have the honor of speaking to the Richmond SPIN group on Continous Integration next week Wednesday, May 13. SPIN is the Software and Systems Process Improvement Network, and are the local groups sponsored by Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute.
My presentation is [...]
Conference season is on its way, as I am writing this RailsConf09 is taking place in Vegas. And the people who brought us RubyFringe will try to repeat their success with this year’s conference called FutureRuby. The conference will be taking place in [...]
I was very excited to learn earlier this week that I had a session proposal for Agile 2009 accepted. In Chicago on Thursday Aug 27, at 4pm, I’ll be discussing How to sell a traditional client on an agile project plan. Here’s how [...]
Today, OpenSource Connections received notification that they had been chosen as a University of Virginia preferred vendor for Web Design, Development, and Programming Services. The new contract should appear on the University of Virginia Preferred Vendor page within the next two weeks.
The range [...]
The slides from this morning’s presentation of Social Networking 201 with the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, presented by me, Marijean Jaggers, and Sasha Farmer, is now available here. Thanks to Sasha and Marijean for making this such a [...]
Last month Scott, Arin, and myself road tripped to attend the Richmond SPIN meeting, where Kris Puthucode of the Software Quality Center gave a talk on “Metrics and Analysis in Companies at Different Maturity Levels of the CMMI
Model”. The focus on the talk was what [...]
Yesterday Arin Sime and I saw Jean Bauer’s presentation on developing the Early American Foreign Service Database that is part of her disseration attempting to identify why the Foreign Service was so effective when it was intrinsicaly a very chaotic unorganized period for what we now call the [...]
On April 1, the Texas State Senate banned Microsoft Vista use by Texas state government agencies. Citing issues with Micosoft Vista and their current level of satisfaction with XP, the Senate specifically called out Microsoft in its budget. Will Texas be the [...]
On March 25th I moderated a panel on the use of social media by businesses, and it was a lot of fun. Many thanks go to all of the roughly 90 attendees for being there, and my fellow CBIC members for all their work putting together the event. The audience [...]
Recently, Facebook released a new look and feel. Over 1 million users complained about the new interface, citing, among other things, that it looks too much like Twitter. Given Twitter’s 1,689% year over' [...]
This coming Wednesday March 25th, I have the honor of moderating a luncheon panel on the uses of social media in business. The panel is hosted by the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council, and is titled “Incorporating Social Media into your business strategy.” You can learn more about the [...]
If you are not a DBA, as is in my case, debugging SQL errors can get tricky and cryptic. An error message like
MySQL has left you
or
General error: 1005 Can’t create table ‘./db_name/table_name.frm’
won’t mean much to you and trying to figure out the problem can be a pain. After some googling [...]
Me ‘Ole Thinkpad was getting very noisy and running extremely hot which got me yearning for a shiny new one. I have configured a new one on the Lenovo site about 50 times over the last few months.
Times being as they are, i decided to investigate what a reasonable DIY’er [...]
Recently I gave a teaching demonstration at a local community college. This was part of the process of becoming an adjunct instructor/professor. If all goes well, I’ll start as early as the coming summer semester. I’m not sure what I’ll be teaching yet, most likely an established, introductory computer science [...]
The Charlottesville Business Innovation Council has announced that nominations are open for this year’s Innovation Awards. I chair the research committee that does the leg work necessary for the judges to pick the recipients of the 11th annual Innovation Awards, and so I want to personally encourage each and every [...]
I recently needed functionality to search a Drupal site, but the Drupal search block was already being used in the header section. And, unless I’m mistaken, the Drupal block admin page only allows a block to be placed in one section. Also I wanted a search that looked only in [...]
I think there is an opportunity for an alternative to Capistrano for managing deployments in the Rails world…. Jamis Buck recently blogged that that he was exhausted and done with Capistrano, hitherto the dominate deployment tool for Rails apps.
On the local #rubycodejam IRC channel I was roundly criticized [...]
I’m going to be a panelist for an April workshop at the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce discussing how to leverage social media to improve your professional and business profile. One of the things that we want to do is show case studies of local companies [...]
This picture may not tell a thousand stories, but I count at least eight Agile related stories, as well as a few others about OpenSource Connections.
Last week I posted a photo and asked people to comment with how many Agile practices they could count in the picture. There were [...]
My sons often get activity books with games in them like “Can you find the 10 different things between these two photos” or “Find these 10 animals hidden in this picture.” So rather than just post a picture of our uber-cool Agile development space with our new client Newswise, I [...]
So I’ve been making these statements on the future of the web for quite some time, but just so I can prove I was “there first”, I thought I should put them into writing!
Prediction 1: Browsers will download complete environments from a web site to display a web site.
And no, [...]
Given two points on the surface of a sphere the Haversine Formula can be used to find the shortest distance between the points. Well what do ya know, the Earth is a sphere. Well not really it’s a spheroid, the poles are a bit flattened. Even that does not [...]
The definition of frustration should be something about expecting a task to be short and simple but instead it takes a really long time. So it was with centering the submit button on a Drupal webform. Now, I don’t want to give you the wrong impression, because the Drupal webforms [...]
We like to get together periodically and hold “Lightning Talks” for an afternoon that focus on what we’ve been doing and learning. However this time we decided to take a full day and get as many of us who could make it to hack together on new things. From 9:00 [...]
A couple weeks ago Youssef posted to our team mailing list that 1234567890 day was coming. I emailed my wife that she should Google for “unix epoch + 1234567890″. Well, apparently she likes Geek humor that relates to Valentines day, because on Monday a pair of shirts from Cafepress [...]
I’ll be speaking on CI for the beTech group March 19th:
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM March 19, 2009
Location: Clemons Library room 407
Please come hear Eric Pugh of Open Source Connections
(http://www.opensourceconnections.com/) discuss Continuous Integration (CI).
The goal of CI is to have “a fully automated and reproducible build [of [...]
On February 12, Jason Hull will be moderating the social media panel at the Charlottesville Regional Chamber of Commerce Business Women’s Roundtable’s Quadruplicity conference.
Have you wondered how to use social networks to improve your personal brand? How to use them to grow your small business? How [...]
Last week I attended a breakfast hosted by the Greater Richmond Technology Council, where I had the opportunity to hear Peggy Feldman discuss the Commonwealth of Virginia’s plans for a more Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Ms Feldman is the Commonwealth’s Chief Applications Officer.
Ms Feldman pointed out a [...]
Jim Stogdill of O’Reilly relates a presentation by LTG Sorenson about the new Battle Command system. I dare not try to recast his insight here. However, he did bring up one topic which I want to elaborate slightly on. We have noticed a trend to tack on new trends and buzzwords [...]
Less than 30 minutes after the completion of the swearing in and taking of the oath of office of the President, one of his mantras, “Change is Coming” came true on the White House blog. Macon Phillips, the Director of New Media, promised winds of change [...]
Last night I had the privilege of talking about Continous Integration (CI) to the fine folks of CVREG, and had a wonderful time. CVREG had good turnout, and it was a great discussion of CI, and how CI can be part of a virtuous circle of becoming better software [...]
Every year people tend to spend the first month or two making promises they are going to break a few moments, maybe weeks later. We tend to lack resolve and have seasonal habits. We act nicer in December to our fellow man (woman), unless it comes to taking the last [...]
On Wednesday, I had the opportunity to attend the Potomac Tech Wire’s 2009 Venture Capital Outlook. First, I applaud the Potomac Tech Wire for putting together a fine panel. All of the panelists were insightful and informed, which made the discussion interesting and flowing.
While there [...]
I bet most people have done the vanity search on Google for themselves, I know I have. The problem with most indexing systems is that they go out and collect lots of information, but most of that information doesn’t have have any sense of time. They are just random [...]
Last Friday I had the huge honor of presenting at ExpoQA 2008 in Madrid on the topic of Continuous Integration, or maybe I should say Integracion Continua since I gave it in Spanish!
I’ve posted the slides along with the transcription of the talk [...]
Stuart Reid of Testing Solutions Group gave a presentation on the new ISO standard for testing.
While ISO standards are not normally my cup of tea, I was interested in learning more about how these standards are generated, especially since software testing is near [...]
Karen N. Johnson gave the keynote after lunch on the topic of Story Telling. I love these kind of topics that at first don’t seem very related to our field, but then end up being relevant. I like to say that software development is like writing poetry. We as [...]
You know Agile is becoming prevalent when the keynote of a conference about testing in the more traditional sense of testing major applications used by airlines, banks, and other financial institutions.
Fran O’Hara from Insight Test Services is speaking [...]
Come see me speak at Expo:QA “Jornadas Profesionales de Calidad y Testing de Software” being held in Madrid, Spain. I’ll be talking about Continous Integration, or Integracion Continua on Friday, November 28. Hopefully see you there.
[...]If you have noticed the earth move or shift this past weekend, do not fear I have the answer. This was the result of the evil planning of Baron “Xaprb” Schwartz who had the genius idea of inviting every big name in the open source database community [...]
Note: This post was delayed a couple weeks.
Today Scott Stults and myself traveled up to DC to exhibit and attend the DoD Open Technologies Conference. We attended last year where Matt Jenks and myself spoke on Agile techniques for Green Field/Brown Field Enviroments. The conference has moved to [...]
This weekend is OpenSQL Camp, here in Charlottesville, Virginia at CitySpace!
I’ve volunteered to help MC the meet and greet and OpenSpaces portions of Friday night. We’ve got people coming in from all over the world, plus a good turnout of interesting Charlottesville [...]
As Eric already indicated in a previous post, this past weekend 4 members of the OpenSource Connections team competed in Rails Rumble 2008. We built a Ruby on Rails app in less than 48 hours, which we called Azimuth and you can see it online [...]
RailsRumble is back, and this year we’ve got a great team, made up of some returners, and new folks. We’re feeling really optimistic that one of us will be walking around with a new belt.
Returning from last years competition, are Eric Pugh and Ashish Tonse. Joining [...]
Ruby DCamp is the first conference, of any type related to ruby or my recent work with Ruby on Rails, I have attended since graduating from UVa. I have been awaiting this opportunity for a while now because my colleagues at OSC have been raving about the kind of [...]
Wednesday, October 12th, I will present on XUL development and discuss what worked while I worked on a XUL project for Opensource Connections. XUL (XML User Interface Language) is Mozilla’s XML-based language that lets you build feature-rich cross platform applications that can run connected or disconnected from the Internet. These applications [...]
We’ve been using “Scrum Poker” to help estimate product backlogs. Today, for a new project, we had planned on using regular playing cards. We were ready to get started, and I realized I didn’t have the playing cards with me, so I googled for some that we could print [...]
Last week four of us from RubyCodeJam took the trip over the mountain to Harrisonburg, VA to join ShRUG for the evening. Alex Herron had arranged for Rich Kilmer and Marcel Molina from InfoEther to come speak. I pretty much took notes on Marcel’s presentation:
Marcel Molina [...]
Semantic MediaWiki (SMW) is a a single extension to the ever-popular MediaWiki that instantly adds semantic web capabilities to your wiki pages. That means that you can annotate important data in the text, relate it with an ontology, format it so it looks pretty on the screen, and [...]
Ruby DCamp is around the corner, and Youssef will be representing OSC at the event.
The event details are:
What: Ruby DCamp
When: Saturday, October 11, 2008 at 09:00 am to Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 05:30 pm
Where: Holiday Inn, Arlington
4610 Fairfax Dr
Arlington, VA 22203
For more event details, visit [...]
This morning, I received an e-mail asking if we’d opened up an office in Zambia. Given my fawning over my trip last year to Botswana and South Africa, it was only natural that someone on the team be curious if I’d actually made the leap and left. After all, he [...]
Stuarts Draft High School is launching their new event called: “Lunch with Future Leaders” and we have been invited to spend some time with the students to discuss with them our careers and the paths we took to get to where we currently are. This is a great opportunity [...]
The founder of the World Wide Web fears it has become a web of lies.
At the initial test run of the Large Hadron Collider, Sir Tim Berners-Lee cited the spread fears of the world about the impact of the LHC on Earth via [...]
I’ll be presenting HighTechCville to the Neon Guild next Monday, September 15.
I’ve been looking forward to this for months because most of the people information in HighTechCville comes from the Neon Guild public membership database. My initial success in finding Communities of Interest came about by looking [...]
Google recently released a beta version of its new web browser appropriately named Chrome. Similar to Google Search, Chrome contains a minimalist, clean and simple user interface. It appears as though Google took the best elements of both Firefox and Internet Explorer and [...]
Eric Lefevre has just put together an aggregated feed of various blogs (including this one!) that discuss techniques and best practices related to the field of Continuous Integration and agile testing in general. You can subscribe to it using this Feedburner link: [feeds.feedburner.com].
While he still needs to [...]
The Charlottesville .NET User Group will meet on September 18th from 6:30-8:30PM at the SNL Headquarters building (One SNL Plaza, Charlottesville VA 22902)
G. Andrew Duthie, Microsoft Corp. will present “Controlling AJAX when you’re out of control”
While implementing and troubleshooting AJAX functionality in an application is rarely easy, it gets even [...]
I love CruiseControl.rb, but one of the things I’ve found is that it exposes via the web interface a lot of what is potentially confidential data. From the cruise_config.rb containing accounts on our SVN server, to being able to browse source files, which would include database.yml, again, exposing usernames [...]
A couple month’s ago I served on the CBIC Innovation Awards research committee. I was able to sit in on an interview with Beth White from Western Albemarle High School who eventually won the Red Apple Award for technology in the classroom. My co-researcher, Sallie Hill, was evaluating, among [...]
Eric and I spent Day 3 at AFCEA’s LandWarNet having a lot of conversations with vendors and with members of Army programs. The main themes of our discussions were security, collaboration, and connectivity. All three are interconnected. Army members must be interconnected if they are going [...]
Youssef Chaker, Arin Sime, Jason Hull, Eric Pugh
[...]