Absolutely No Machete Juggling

I’m in the process of doing research about the usage of Test-Driven Development within Open Source projects. It’s part of my master’s thesis for Regis University.

The survey only has three required questions and should take less than 30 seconds to fill out. If you have worked on an open source project, please help me with my research by filling it out.

It would also help greatly if you distributed the link to this post or to the survey form itself to your project mailing lists and encouraged other developers to fill it out as well.

When my research is complete, I’ll post the results on this web site. Thank you for your time.

The link to the survey is here.

I’ve been a fat guy since I was in elementary school. I had a growth spurt around 10th grade that thinned me out a lot, but then I regained all of that weight in college, and then some.

One day I hit 290, which became something of a wake-up call for me. I really didn’t want to break the 300 barrier, but I had been steadily gaining weight for the past few years and I was well on my way to being over 300 pounds. Combined with my father’s increasing problems due to his diabetes, I had become worried enough about my future that I decided to do something about my weight in 2007.

I have tried a number of different things over the course of my life, though I never tried any fad diets like South Beach or Atkins. I tried limiting my food intake, I tried riding my bike to work to get exercise, but I remained steadily creeping toward 300 pounds and a future as a diabetic.

To make a long story very, very short, exactly one year later I weighed 200 pounds, having lost 90 pounds. No surgeries, no fad diets.

There were a number of things I did that I consider to have made the difference between an unsuccessful attempt at losing weight and a successful one. I’ve decided to share these things on the intarwebs, in hopes that they might motivate or help someone else struggling with their weight.

Continue reading ‘How I Lost 90 Pounds in One Year’ »

There is a movement brewing in the world of professional software development. This movement is concerned not merely with writing functional, correct code, but also on writing good code. Taking pride in code. This movement is the Software Craftsmanship movement, and one of the people near the head of this movement is Robert C. Martin, also known as Uncle Bob.

His book “Clean Code” is, in many ways, an introduction to the concept of Software Craftsmanship and a guide for developers interested in becoming craftsmen. Clean Code is not about only writing correct code, it’s about writing code that is designed well, code that reads well, and code that expresses the intent of the author.

Continue reading ‘Book Review: Clean Code’ »

I love RSS feeds. I love the fact that I live in a time where the vast majority of sites that I find interesting have managed to export their data, updated live, in a universal format that I can pull together in a single place. I can read what’s going on with hundreds of sites I care about by visiting a single site like Google Reader, or through a single piece of software or a browser plugin. It’s great.

But this comes with a downside. I have almost 200 subscriptions in my Google Reader account. Many of these subscriptions are to sites, such as Reddit or Digg, that themselves, aggregate other sites. I have divided my Google Reader subscriptions along various categorical tags (such as politics, development, movies, etc) as well as priority tags (Must Read, Should Read, Can Read, Can Ignore, and Should Ignore) but even that isn’t quite enough to manage the firehose of information coming my way via RSS.

I have utilized Yahoo Pipes to manage this deluge of information and I thought I’d take some time to share how. This article will serve both as a basic tutorial for using Yahoo Pipes to manage your RSS feeds as well as a place to show some specific examples I use to control my feeds that you can use as well if you subscribe to the same sites I do.

Continue reading ‘Managing The Firehose: Controlling RSS Through Pipes’ »

(Crossposted from Goodreads)

The Political Brain

Drew Westen’s book, “The Political Brain,” is illuminating and engaging. The author is an expert in the human mind, and has devoted his book to relating his understanding of the brain to the world of politics.

Westen talks about what people really look at when they evaluate politicians and candidates. He backs up his assertions with many studies and experiments, clearly laying out exactly how the human mind works when it attempts to “decide” who to vote for.

I learned a great amount about the human mind reading the book. When I look back and evaluate campaigns or candidates, I can now see exactly where they went wrong (or right) and what they could have done differently. I understand how my fellow voters think, and I’ve even gained a great deal of insight into how I think (though I didn’t realize it).

Continue reading ‘Book Review: The Political Brain’ »