Hiring a Programmer

Next time I need to find and hire a new programmer (which I hope won't be for a long time), I think I'm going to follow  Aaron Swartz's hiring process.  Thanks for the tweet on this Brandon!

LINQ Success Story

While processing some order data that comes in via a SOAP web service, I needed to check to make sure that user would not exceed the maximum allowable quantity for that product for the month.  Easy enough, I started looping through the products and checked the quantity against how much they've ordered that month.  It then occurred to me that I needed to make sure that if they ordered the product twice in the same order (placed the item in the shopping cart twice resulting in two line items on the order), then I total the quantity.  Think about how I would do this in the past, I'd be looping through all of the line items in the list multiple times.

With LINQ, it was simple to code up:

var products = from i in request.LineItems
               group i by i.ProductID
               into p
                select new {ProductID = p.Key, Quantity = p.Sum(i => i.Quantity)};

I could then loop through products and once and leave LINQ take care of the ugliness of grouping the products and totaling their quantities.

While this is a very simple example of LINQ and doesn't show it's full power or potential, it does demonstrate how it can be used in normal code using standard collection objects to simplify your code and still get the job done.

Technorati Tags: .NET,LINQ

Who Is Mucking With Google Maps?

A few months ago I noticed something.  I could no longer find my apartment address in Google Maps.  I was attempting to get directions from my apartment to another location and Google Maps just could not find it.  For 3 years I lived at that apartment and never has Google Maps not been able to find it.  I thought I was just going insane or something or that I was mistyping it.  Live Maps was still able to find the address.  It didn't matter if I put in the address on file with USPS or the way I was used to writing it out.  Nothing.

Now this morning I found something else out.  I was skimming the Google Blog and came across this post about Street View.  The areas listed blanketed my home town so I decided to see if they had street views available.  So I typed in my parents' address and something even stranger popped up.  First, the address it corrected to was for a different city.  Now, my parents' address does not actually exist in the USPS database.  In fact, the whole town, population of about 800, has PO Box addresses only in the USPS database.  Also the mail happens to come through this other town that Google Maps decided to change the address to.  However, this would never fly as an address to get mail delivered.  Never has Google Maps had a problem finding my parents' house.  And it never decided to change it to something else.

The second thing I noticed was that the roads in my home town were very off the mark.  The street that my folks live on shows a hook at the end of the street.  I've traveled that street by foot, bike and car tens of thousands of times.  Never once have I noticed a hook in the street.  We're talking a 45 degree change in direction.  Kind of hard to miss.  The street in reality is completely straight.  It also shows the south end of the street extending further than it actually does and connecting to another court.  This is not possible as it would cut through houses.  Our street is not the only one messed up.  My home town is nearly grid-like and Google Maps shows the streets angling in ways that it just does not.  Many of these streets have existed this way for 80+ years.  How can a mapping system be so completely wrong?

So I hopped over to Live Maps and sure enough, I found both my apartment address and my parents' address and my home town's street layout is correct.

I took a look at the caption on the bottom of the screen and noticed that the provider for Google Maps is Tele Atlas.  I don't recall for certain, but this may not be who has been the provider for Google Maps over the past couple years. If this is the case, Google, I implore you, drop Tele Atlas because their data is just blatantly wrong!

I don't feel as though I can trust Google Maps at this point so, for the time being at least, I will be switching to Live Maps until Google can win my trust again.  And I will be encouraging others I know to do the same.  I do not want them getting lost because of Google's directions or ending up in a bad neighborhood because of it.  Kind of dramatic, yes.  But when your mapping system suddenly loses your home address or starts making your home town look like a Picasso painting, are you really going to stick around?

"Software Tools You Should Be Using and Blogs You Should Be Reading"

I've read so many Dugg and Kicked articles about "Top 10 Tools" or "Top 10 Blogs", etc. that you should be using and probably aren't.  Every time I read one I think, what makes that person the authority on this topic and what research did they do to determine that yes, in fact these are the top 10 tools or blogs?  But ultimately it's just a title that is meant to draw your attention to tell you what tools that person or team is using or blogs they read.  And who knows, you may even find a tool or blog that you've never heard of but is just the one you've been looking for.

However, there's a problem with these articles.  There's a huge portion ("huge" added for dramatic effect, I have no research showing exactly how much) of the target audience that isn't even reading that article.  There are developers out there, probably working for a small company on a team of 5 or less that simply will never end up reading that article or hearing about those tools.  They may even be ignorant to the fact that such things exist.  These people are the ones who need to be reading these articles the most.  They are the ones positioned to gain the most benefit from it.

I'm not saying that anyone that works for a small company on a team of 5 or less fits in that category.  I work for just such a company yet I do not fit in that category.  In fact, I and a colleague brought a toolset to the company I currently work for and the other developers didn't realize that there were such tools out there or maybe just never bothered to really try to find them.  We've recently brought a new developer onboard and even in his experience working for several companies, including software development contracting companies, had never seen a toolset as large as the one we had constructed at this company.  We're talking the basics: source control, build processes, development aids such as Notepad++ and RegexBuddy.

So what makes us different from the developers that don't have an extensive toolset?  Much of the suggestions I'm about to make extend beyond the tools you use and into the improvement within your field in general.

Read the best blogs and technology sites

This one has been preached several times over.  I'm guilty not doing this one well though.  I read a couple, but I don't read the best ones and I tend to gloss over too many articles without actually paying attention to them.

This also requires changing your habits from time to time.  Blogs and technology sites go stale or become polluted with bad information.  Sometimes you have to give up on a site and move on to the next one.  Don't be afraid to abandon one of your favorite sites after it has gone bad or lost the lead.  Don't let their falling behind let you fall behind.

Strive for improvement

It's not just a matter of reading news on technology sites or reading popular blogs to try to stay on top of your field.  You have to be constantly on the lookout for better ways to do what you're doing.  You're not going to be spoon-fed every new tool, better process, better techniques or new technology.  Sometimes you have to go hunt for a better way by yourself.

Don't be satisfied with Notepad to record your notes or edit your text files.  There's Notepad++ and it's free!  Better yet, there's Microsoft OneNote for keeping track of your notes.  Don't want to pay for OneNote?  How about Zoho Notebook or Google Notebook?  Software constantly breaking because you and another developer deploy from your local working copy and end up ultimately overwriting each other's changes?  Set up a build server and build process.  It's what all the big boys do and maybe it's time you do too even if you're working for a Mom and Pop shop.  As long as it can improve your process, why not consider it?  NAnt does wonders for creating a build process and CruiseControl.NET is great for setting up the build server.  Both are free and XML based so they're fairly easy to work with.  Don't like those?  Search for more.  Search for better.

Also, when reading technology articles about the 'Top 10 Blabity Blah', don't be satisfied with what the author is telling you.  Look for better.  You may stumble upon a whole new slew of tools and blogs and ways of doing things that you've never heard of.

The same can be said for developing and testing software.  Don't be satisfied writing code the same way you used to.  Learn about design patterns, development methodologies, software testing techniques.

You have to be constantly hungry for knowledge.

Be curious

Don't shy away from the unknown.  Take a look at the ads on your favorite blogs or the technology site that you just discovered searching for a solution to your problem.  Hear something you've never heard of?  Google it.  Learn more about it.  It may not be as complicated as you think or it could help you in ways you've never dreamed.

A colleague once asked me if I had ever heard of 'Inversion of Control' (IoC).  I hadn't.  I read about it on Wikipedia and kind of got it.  But I was curious so I kept digging.  I found out about 'Dependency Injection' (DI) and 'Aspect Oriented Programming' (AOP).  All of which I was never taught about in college.  Never anything even remotely similar to these.  This also led me to the Spring.NET framework.  I started playing around with Spring.NET and within a month had employed IoC/DI and AOP and it greatly reduced the complexity of my code, decreased the development time and increased the unit testability and the system testability of the application.

On another day, I had been searching for the solution to a problem and saw an ad for XHTMLiT.  This company claimed to take any design file (of the popular file types such as PSD, PNG and AI) and generate valid XHTML and CCS.  They also said all the right things such as 'table-less' design (if you want), hand-coded and more.  All this in 8 business hours and for an extremely low price!  I was curious and decided on an upcoming web site revamp to try them out.  The price fit well within the budget and if they could get it taken care of in 8 hours, then they'd save me a bunch of time.  Sure enough, they delivered and got it done in far less time than it would have taken me.  If I hadn't taken the time to click that ad, I would have added probably a week or more to the schedule for that project.

Listen to others and more than that, talk to others

Don't wait for your friends or colleagues to tell you what they are doing or what they are using.  Ask them.  A vast portion of my knowledge and tools I use have been conveyed to me from one of my colleagues.  He does a lot of the footwork for gathering the information and I basically leech off of his knowledge.  Ok, I don't leech.  I do reciprocate.  I educated him on Spring.NET, AOP, IoC and DI.  So when I say 'talk' to others, I also mean that you should volunteer your knowledge.  They may be one of the people waiting to be spoon-fed.  So spoon-feed them once in a while and then educate them on how you learn about everything.

Don't be afraid to experiment

You have to experiment and play with new tools, technology and techniques before you can become familiar with them.  It's a rare breed that can simply read about something and put it into play the next day.  The first couple tries at using something may not be pretty.  But you learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes.  Edison himself learned 2000 ways not to make a light bulb.

The toughest part about this one is that you either have to experiment on your company's time or your time.  The choice is yours, but either way, you have to do it.  Sometimes just monkeying with something helps you figure it out easier than reading about it or being taught about it and you can learn things about it that may not have been obvious or documented or taught.

Don't accept the world the way it is

Just because a set of processes, tools, etc. are already in place does not mean that they are the best.  Be the butterfly flapping its wings off the coast of India that causes a tornado in Kansas.  Speak up.  Suggest the new stuff.  Even if they don't change to what you suggest, it may be the catalyst for other change.  And sometimes you have to be more forceful.  Sometimes you have to implement a new tool without anyone knowing just so you can prove to them that it works.  Be smart when choosing to do this, but don't be afraid to do it if you think it will work.

Don't be afraid to throw the old stuff out

Things change all the time.  Tools, processes, methodologies, none of these live in a bubble.  They are subject to the same rules as everything else and thus they change as well.  When a tool just doesn't cut it anymore, get rid of it.  You may love it, have a long history with it and are an expert with it, but if it doesn't get the job done, then what good is it?  Throw it away and get a new one.

You must unlearn that which you have learned.

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  When you have a better hammer, everything still looks like a nail, but the nails are easier to pound.

I've got a million of these... Ok, I don't.

Keep your eyes open

One of things I have seen done as part of Lean is to observe your day-to-day tasks.  Even go as far as video tape your day.  Then analyze it.  Really scrutinize it for waste.  If you find waste, try to figure out if there's a tool that would be helpful in reducing or eliminating that waste.  Be mindful of what you are doing.  Things that are repetitive that we've done day in and day out are often glossed over and not seen as waste because we do them all the time and don't think twice of why we do it the way we do.  Find these tasks and ask why you do them that way and if there's a better way to do it or if there is something that will help you do it better or faster.

Not everything I suggested here is always feasible within a company because you are dealing with their money and time.  I can't go learn a new tool if my company doesn't allow me or I don't have the time.  Just be smart and you can sometimes find ways.  Explain to your manager how it could benefit the company and in the long run save them money.  But just because it may be difficult to follow these suggestions does not mean that they are any less valid of points.

Got any other suggestions?  Leave a comment.

Technorati Tags: Development Tools

One Scary Judge Of Talent

How does a programmer judge how talented he or she is?

I got to thinking today about one of my major projects.  It's a vital piece of our daily business and would cost the company a large amount of money if it came grinding to a halt for a day.

There are two new branches of this application that were recently rolled out and while I was rolling the first out I worked extensively with the team that would be benefiting from this branch to get this developed to meet their needs.  After I rolled it out, it was modified slightly to become the second branch that was rolled out.  I haven't heard much from the team that is using that second branch but I know it gets used heavily and they benefit dramatically from it.  In fact, as I thought about it, I hadn't heard from the first team in a while either.  I called someone up from the second team to find out how things were going and she said things were going great! and thanked me for checking in.

I'm not saying I'm talented (I'll leave that up to my peers to decide), but I did take a large amount of pride in my work today.  If I were to try to judge how talented I was, I would take the fact that this major piece of software that is used so heavily and has had no complaints against it or feature requests for it to assist in that judgement.

I admit this could also mean that people have come to live with it, deal with the problems and have been too lazy to request new features or think the feature requests will fall on deaf ears.  However, this software hasn't been out long enough for people to "learn to deal with it" and the second team sounded very pleased with it making me believe they truly have no feature requests at this time.