Good by fish :-(

/

I went home last night and Wifey told me we've lost another fish.  This is our second fish that we've lost since we've taken custody of the fish tank of a dear friend.

We never named the fish.  My logic was that if you name the fish you became emotionally attached to him a lot more.  Given that fish have much shorter life-spans than other pets, and are not likely to respond to name commands (unlike say a dog), there was no good reason to name the fish.

Still it was a bit sad to wrap the fish up in a piece of tissue and put him away.  The fish was drying up very quickly once it's out of the water and already I can see decay claiming it.

That was the 2nd of our small fish to go.  Now there's only the larger fish left in the tank.  I'm debating about whether to buy more but currently I'm settling on "no", I think when our friend comes back we'll return this tank, and then go ahead and get ourselves a bigger tank and we'll fill it with more fish.

jliu

A (near) perfect project for 2008

/

A (near) perfect project for 2008 would be:

  • Use WPF for front-end (or WPF/E silverlight)
  • Use LINQ for business tier (C# 3.5)
  • Use SQL Server 2008 for the database

Bonus points

  • Use XNA libraries (hmm starting to sound like a game!)
  • Pay lots of money (no, can't be a game then)

If you have a project like above, and are after an experienced .NET developer email me NOW!

jliu

Undisciplined Software Development

/

When I was overseas in Asia I had an opportunity to observe some "undisciplined software development".

I think it is a cultural issue.  The project is driven top-down by money (as it is with western software development), but by the time it gets to the project manager, the project is pretty much "results-driven".  The faster the developers can produce results, the better.

This leads to basically hacks.  Hack this and hack that to create results.  Don't worry too much about bugs - create results first and fix bugs later.

When a new customer wants something that is somewhat similar to your old product for an existing customer, copy and paste the entire source code branch and make your changes in the new folder hierarchy.  It all sounds incredibly to me, but I think I view it as a problem with the project management.  The project team doesn't understand values in terms of zero-defect programming, test-driven programming, maintainability.

I believe they would do well to migrate to an agile-based development, but it must be driven top down from the project management and preached to the developers.  Some of the ideas are so foreign that I'd even imagine resistance from the developers.

jliu