Category: Blatant Self Promotion

Talking with Isaac Levin on Coffee & Open Source

Isaac Levin was kind enough to have me on his Coffee & Open Source show to talk about a variety of topics around technology and my involvement with OSS work.

I need to update my profile here and there, that picture was taken on my late grandparents farm around Christmas of 2010 outside the titular Jasper, MO

I’d say that my time in OSS has long been valuable in terms of increased technical skillset and occasionally through opportunities that arose because of my OSS tools. It’s just now though that I’m finally living out my longstanding dream to make my “Critter Stack” OSS work (Marten & Wolverine) be my actual job as part of JasperFx Software.

Just to call a few highlights and to add to our conversation after having some time to think about things:

  • I made a double edged bit of advice at the end to “take your shot” when you have a technical idea that could become your job, but followed by an exhortation to stop working on something that isn’t bringing you joy or opportunities.
  • Unfortunately, failure is an awesomely effective teacher — if you let it be. I feel like the Critter Stack tools are succeeding right now, and plenty of that is due to some harsh lessons learned from my earlier failures in OSS.
  • OSS projects can succeed with a mix of having a conceptual idea or approach that appeals to enough folks, a dedicated core team of contributors like Oskar and Babu, and an enthusiastic and patient community that helps with suggestions, bug reports, and contributions. I called out Wolverine especially as a tool whose usability has largely been driven by the feedback of several early adopters. Moreover, one of the hard lessons learned from my earlier failure with FubuMVC is how important it is to get enough user feedback to sand off rough edges with a tool’s usability or documentation.
  • I personally find it very gratifying to be working on my projects, carrying out my vision, and generally having my hand on the steering wheel of Marten and Wolverine. I’m also enjoying the hands on consulting engagements I’m doing with the current JasperFx clients and making a positive difference for them. The obvious takeaway for me — and probably for a great number of you out there as well — is that I am much happier when I feel like I have significant ownership over the work and that my contributions are respected and valued by the customer, management, product owner, or colleagues. I’ve been consistently miserable in jobs or roles where I didn’t have either of those two things.

Presentations in NDC London and Skillsmatter in December

Back in the old days I used to get aggravated at folks that asked to blog on CodeBetter and then do nothing but post about their upcoming conference talks, but now I’m apparently that guy now.

Anyway, I’m going to be in London the first week of December for NDC London and a night at Skillsmatter.  At NDC I’m giving a talk on my organization’s experiences with automated testing and some of the technical strategies we use to get better results and more reliable tests against very enterprise-y systems.  Don’t be fooled by the word “testing” in the title, this is a very technical talk with no hint of non-coding Agile Coach “all you need is good communication” naiveté and very little process mumbo jumbo.

I’m also going to be playing straight man to Rob Ashton and Rob Conery’s snark filled shenanigans in a debate over testability on the .Net platform versus Node.js.  While many folks have already written me off (the .Net side), just remember that the Harlem Globetrotters would be no fun without the Washington Generals around.

Most excitedly for me, I’m getting to go speak Thursday night, Dec. 4th at Skillsmatter on several of the OSS projects I work on and with.  I’ll…

  • Discuss FubuMVC’s approach to modularity and how my organization exploits this to cleanly isolate feature development in large applications.
  • Demonstrate the much improved “fubu new” story for mix and match generation of a full code trees
  • Briefly explain why I think RavenDb could be one of the best things to ever happen to .Net development and how we’re using it inside FubuMVC applications and our test automation harness.
  • Show how we’ve used Katana to create an efficient development server and an option for embedding FubuMVC in any .Net process.
  • Explain why in the world we went to the effort of building Ripple (http://fubuworld/ripple) to smooth out our early issues with using Nuget for complex dependency management.
  • Talk about some of our new tools and tricks for distributed development including the new FubuTransportation service bus. I’ll also show how we’re using multi-AppDomain support with our Bottles modularity framework to make debugging and testing easier for distributed development.
  • The 3.0 release of StructureMap is close to being released, and while IoC containers are a dime a dozen now, I’d like to share some of the hard lessons I’ve learned about usability, non-insane exception messages, performance, and useful diagnostics over the past decade of developing and supporting StructureMap.
  • And just in case you thought xUnit tools were a completely solved problem, I’d love to talk about why I’m so enthusiastic about the new Fixie testing tool (https://github.com/plioi/fixie)

This is my first time to spend any kind of significant time in London and I’m looking forward to catching up with old friends on your side of the pond and the inevitable bouts of “man, I didn’t recognize you from your twitter avatar.”