Absolutely No Machete Juggling

JB0959

Originally uploaded by rodhilton

The photos from my wedding are up on Flickr. Check ‘em out here. Our photographer was excellent. I highly recommend her.

The wedding was great. Virtually nothing went wrong – we even just barely avoided some rain but avoided it nonetheless. I was kind of dreading having to be social for a whole evening, but even the reception turned out to be a good time (though I had to go hide in order to eat my slice of cake).

Overall, being married doesn’t feel too much different from not being married. I’ve known I’d marry Julia since second week we dated, and I knew she’d make a beautiful bride (she did).

It was great seeing family and merging my 7-person family with her 100-something-person family. I also really loved how many of our friends from college were able to make it, including one of my professors. It was great seeing everyone again.

My friend Dennis was a fantastic Best Man, and Julia’s sister Olivia did an wonderful job as Maid of Honor. It was a truly unforgettable time.

As I grow through my career as a software developer, I have tried to remain aware of what makes me happy or unhappy at a job. What I decided was that there were three factors in job satisfaction, so I found myself amazed that someone else had posted something similar: Alan Skorkin explains his Three Pillars of Job Satisfaction.

I agree that there are three pillars, but I disagree about what the pillars are, at least for myself.

I’ve found that these are the main three factors in determining how happy I am at a job:

1. The People
2. The Project
3. The Company

Some of these may seem redundant, so let me elaborate.

Continue reading ‘My Personal 3 Pillars of Job Satisfaction’ »

After I proposed to my girlfriend, I was tasked with finding a good first dance song for us. This was not easy, as I typically listen to hard rock, with occasional smatterings of other genres.

I got quite lucky, however, when I went through my one of these other genres, my Jonathan Coulton folder, and found a song called I’m Your Moon.

It’s a super geeky little song about Pluto and it’s moon, Charon. The chorus goes:

I’m your moon,
you’re my moon,
we go round and round.

Anyway, we both really liked this song because it was kind of nerdy and had a double meaning (to someone unaware of the science, it just sounds like a nice love song).

Continue reading ‘I’m Your Moon (Wedding Remix)’ »

I do not belong to the cult of iPod. I use a nonstandard mp3 player and I hate iTunes. If I’m going to use an mp3 player, it needs to show up as a USB drive on my Linux workstation, my Windows desktop, and my Mac laptop. I need to be able to drag files over and be done with it. So far, I’ve been successful at accomplishing this.

But the simplicity comes with a price. I cannot download books from Audible.com and put them on my player to listen to them. I have to convert all of the files I download from Audible into DRM-free mp3 files. But most instructions on the internet advocate a cumbersome process, many involving that unholy beast iTunes, which effectively just plays the audio books while capturing the output stream.

I have developed an alternative to this method, which lets you convert your Audible audio book downloads to DRM-free mp3s in just a few minutes, with a very small amount of manual work.

Continue reading ‘How To: Convert Audible .aa Files to .mp3 Quickly’ »

Change is inevitable in the world of software. In fact, the need for change and the related need to adapt to change are the driving forces behind the agile movement. Requests for change generally come in one of two main forms: enhancements and defects. A defect means “the software isn’t working the way it says it will”, whereas an enhancement basically means “the software isn’t working the way the customer wants.”

The basic cycle of modern software development looks like this:

1. The customer tells the development team (often through a product owner) what he or she wants the software to do.
2. The development team responds to this by telling the customer what it will do (via direct conversation, help documentation, the UI, etc).
3. The development team makes the software do it.
4. The customer tells the team how well it did.

It’s step 4 that generates change requests. The customer says that something isn’t working the way they want it to be working, and the cycle repeats.

Very often, you will hear developers whine about enhancements that are being filed as defects. Product owners will often respond by saying that it doesn’t matter, it all has to be fixed. A common phrase I hear is “they are all defects from the customer’s perspective.” This mentality is echoed in Practices of an Agile Developer. The attitude is generally, defects and enhancements are basically the same thing, it’s all work that needs to be done, and programmers are being pedantic when they insist on making the distinction.

But here’s the deal: the programmers are right.

Continue reading ‘Enhancement vs. Defect: More Than Pedantry’ »