A Case for Agile: Benefits for a Programmer’s Career

Theo, 4 Comments

After graduating college as a computer science major and preparing to enter the work force, I found that there is a big gap between what you learn in college and the practice of being a software engineer.

In college, you learn the the basics of data structures, OOP, and algorithms. But being a software engineer is so much more than that. At my first job out of college, I was lucky enough to be a part of a great team of engineers. They understood the value of best practices, introducing me to design patterns, the power of open source, and how to approach hard problems.

However, it was very one dimensional. While I improved my technical experience, I really didn’t get a chance to be exposed to other perspectives. What I mean is it was very much like college again. My work was my own work. I studied, researched, and provided answers. I didn’t really collaborate with my coworkers. I was given an assignment and an estimated deadline and I would do it kind of like homework.

At my second and current job, I’ve been introduced to and been practicing agile software development, more specifically Scrum, on a daily basis. I’ve seen the HUGE personal benefits that a software engineer, like myself, can take away from developing software this way.

I’ll break it down through what is known as the four values of Agile Software Development.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
While being exposed to version control, bug tracking, and continuous integration systems is great for a resume, working with other human beings is much more rewarding and fun. You develop strong relationships and you are able to learn so much from other people’s experiences and perspectives. Pair programming has helped me develop a better understanding of what I don’t know and an even stronger understanding of what I already know. And it’s not only other developers you develop these relationships with. As requirements change, you interact with people from marketing, product, legal, qa, project managers, designers, and the list goes one. This is something you would never get as a programmer at an IT shop that practiced something like the Waterfall method for development, especially early in your career. You will be pigeon-holed into just being code monkey by the time the requirements get to you. Being able to interact with different types of people allows you to grow your network and it exposes you to different aspects of a business.

Working software over comprehensive documentation
As developers, we just like to get things done. We have a tendency to measure productivity with written code. With agile, we can embrace this 100%. I get to concentrate on writing bug fixes, add new features, refactor code, improving the build process rather than documenting some API that no one will ever need since the code is self-documenting. I take great joy in actually doing what I love doing and that’s coding. However, it is a fallacy to interpret this value to mean I don’t have to document anything. But whenever there is no documentation, don’t blame agile. Just rely on the first value and ask someone what that method does.

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Developers don’t usually have face to face time with actual paying customers. Usually the “customer” is some other department in the company asking for a new development feature. The main point to be made here is that you want to engage the stakeholders. Not only do you develop relationships, you gather in-depth knowledge of what problems other people are facing on a daily basis. Understanding requirements is often the most difficult part of developing software. As requirements change, with constant engagement from the customer you have a better chance at meeting those requirements. The other piece of this value has to do with deadlines. Contracts are hard deadlines. In the software development, with all its moving pieces, it’s pretty silly to commit to arbitrary dates six months from today. But if you engage stakeholders into your development process, they have clear visibility into the progress of the project. You don’t have to make excuses for why the project is late. They already know what you’re working on and where you are. How does this benefit you? Well, you get to deliver software that actually meets the customer’s needs. Who’s the rock star now?

Responding to change over following a plan
Nothing is ever set in stone. Being able to respond to the evolution of a project is critical to a project’s success. If you are able to learn to design programs that have the flexibility to adapt to your business, that is one awesome accomplishment. It’s a great feeling to be able to say to a product manager that his requested change is already supported by the system, it’s just a configuration change. The language you are using now is most likely not the one you will be using in the future, if you choose to remain a developer. Being able to respond to this change in sought after skills will benefit you well.

Through agile development, I’ve been able to deliver working software time and time again. I’ve been exposed to all different aspects of the business. I’ve learn what I like and don’t like to do. I’ve learn what pieces of business I’m interested in and the pieces I don’t care much for. I’ve developed some really good working relationships. I’ve tackled some hard problems. I’ve learned to respond and adapt to the change and turmoil of a startup.

Most importantly, I still feel I’m growing as a developer. I honestly believe the best thing a developer can do in their career is to always be learning. Everything else will follow.

A Case for Agile: Benefits for a Programmer’s Career

Installing Java SDK/Tomcat to Ubuntu Feisty (Part 2)

Theo2 Comments

In the previous post, I described how to get your Java SDK installed on your machine. In this piece, I’ll lay out how to get your tomcat instance up and running.

Let’s setup our JAVA_HOME. While you can set this setting in many places, I decide to stick it in bash.bashrc.

My Java installation from apt-get put Java under /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun.

sudo vi /etc/bash.bashrc

Enter in:

# set JAVA_HOME environment variable
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

Save and quit vi. Log out and log back into your console and you should be able to do

 >>echo $JAVA_HOME
/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun

I went through the initial attempt of installing tomcat from apt-get. This resulted in a successfully download of all the files, but I wasn’t able to get tomcat to start up. Not only that, it installed tomcat and created symbolic links everywhere and there were permission issues galore. Thanks to the beauty of slicehost, I just rebuilt my machine from my previous snapshot (luckily I made a snapshot after the previous post).

So, I decided to just download and install tomcat manually. I decided on apache-tomcat-5.5.25.

To get started, download the tarball and extract it somewhere.

wget http://apache.cs.utah.edu/tomcat/tomcat-5/v5.5.25/bin/apache-tomcat-5.5.25.tar.gz
tar xzvf apache-tomcat-5.5.25.tar.gz
cp -R apache-tomcat-5.5.5 <PATH_TO_TOMCAT_INSTALL>

You will need to go to the bin directory and set some file permissions so you can execute some of the files.

cd <PATH_TO_TOMCAT_INSTALL>/bin
sudo chmod a+x *.sh

It’s a probably good time to see if things are looking good. So try,

 >> ./version.sh
Using CATALINA_BASE:   /usr/share/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME:   /usr/share/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/share/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME:       /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun
Server version: Apache Tomcat/5.5.25
Server built:   Aug 24 2007 05:33:50
Server number:  5.5.25.0
OS Name:        Linux
OS Version:     2.6.16.29-xen
Architecture:   amd64
JVM Version:    1.6.0-b105
JVM Vendor:     Sun Microsystems Inc.

Sexy. Let’s go ahead and try to startup tomcat.

./startup.sh

By default, tomcat should be running on port 8080. (If you tried to install from apt-get, it’s setup on port 8180)


tomcat default page

Setting up the tomcat manager

sudo vi conf/tomcat-users.xml

We need to setup a manager role to see the tomcat status page:

<tomcat-users>
  ...
  <role rolename="manager">
  ...
  <user username="admin" password="mysecretpassword" roles="tomcat,manager">
</tomcat-users>

Restart tomcat and confirm you can log into the Tomcat status page and we’re done!

TODOS:

  • I need to setup the system to run tomcat on startup
  • I need to write an init.d script
  • I need to get tomcat to proxy through apache via mod_jk
Installing Java SDK/Tomcat to Ubuntu Feisty (Part 2)

Installing Java SDK/Tomcat to Ubuntu Feisty (Part 1)

Theo4 Comments

When I first got my slice, I had it setup with java and tomcat. Apparently, I updated or rebuilt my slice and forgot to install those two again. Too bad I didn’t take good notes because I totally forgot how to do it.

So this time, I’m going to document it via this post.

I am currently running Ubuntu Feisty (v. 7.04). You can find out what version you’re running by running the following command:

cat /etc/issue

The usual apt-get command allows me to install sun-j2re1.4. That’s not very helpful if I want to compile java code off of my slice or set it up to be a continuous build server. I remember that I had to add a specific repository in order to be able to install the Java SDK via apt-get. After some digging around, I came up with the following:

sudo vi /etc/apt/sources.list

Paste the following into the file:

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu feisty universe multiverse

The Ubuntu docs recommend enabling the universe/multiverse security/updates repositories to prevent version mismatches during installs or upgrades but I didn’t run into any issues proceding without them.

Save and exit out of vi.

Next, run

sudo apt-get update

apt-get should be pulling down an updated list of installable packages. So if you type

sudo apt-get install sun-j

and then hit TAB, you should get a list of installable sun packages.

I decided to install Java 6.0 SDK.

sudo apt-get install sun-java6-sdk

It will begin to download and install the SDK. You will have to accept a license. Just hit TAB to get select “OK” and hit enter.

Once it completes, you should be able to confirm the JDK was installed successfully.

  >> javac -version
javac 1.6.0

The next post will lay out steps to install Apache Tomcat.

Installing Java SDK/Tomcat to Ubuntu Feisty (Part 1)

Dynamically targeted links

TheoLeave a comment

In the previous post, I quickly created a widgetized blog feed. However, the dynamically generated HTML included links that would open in the same window that the links was on. Under normal circumstances, this is the best user experience. However since Clearspring generates HTML-based feeds in an iframe, clicking on any of the links in the widget caused the page to be rendered in the small, confined space of 300×236 pixels.

I know I could have used document.getElementsByTagName('a') but I was wondering if there was a nicer way to grab all the links on a page. Googling around pointed me to this post. I can get all the links on a page by using document.links, which returns an array of the links on a page as DOM objects. I haven’t tested this on all browsers, but that’s pretty sweet.

Here’s the code in it’s entirety to make all links on a page open up in a new window:

<script type="text/javascript">
var links = document.links;
for( var i = 0 ; i < links.length ; i++ ) {
   links[i].setAttribute('target','_blank');
}
</script>
Dynamically targeted links

Fun with widgets

Theo2 Comments

I came across a Clearspring back a months ago when they were TechCrunch’d and more recently, I came across Wigetized.com, made by a fellow slichoster.

I wanted to try out both and I thought it would be interesting to combine the powers of both services.

I created my widgetized blog feed from wigitized.com, created a widget cname, updated my apache2 config, created a new directory, and pasted in the generated wigetized html into a new file. Oh, and I bounced apache2.

And TA-DA! A widgetized feed!

Next step was to create a new Clearspring Widget from this. Clearspring has done a good job of making this ridiculously easy. You have a couple of options of how to create widget (flash, HTML, js, image). I went with HTML since I had HTML was just to provide the URL to the HTML and a name for the widget.

Once I had the widget added to the Clearspring platform, all I really had to do was publish it and now I have a Clearspring tracked widget.


Next, I’ll be interested in see how I can leverage the platform in different ways to make this widget “viral” and what sort of analytics come with Clearspring to help me track its viralocity (did I make that word up?).

Fun with widgets

Re: Young IT workers disillusioned

Theo, 3 Comments

After reading this article, I had to vent on the ridiculousness of the article.

The article is pretty much a summary of a survey done by an IT staffing firm. It states that entry-level, 20-something year old employees are the most difficult to manage because they have high expectations from their employer. High expectations like good salaries, bonuses/rewards, and an office. Some pointy-haired boss mentioned in the article said “the problem between employers and the younger generation just entering the workforce can be traced back to the employees’ upbringing or an easier way of life for children in the United States today.”

With condescending statements like that, why would I want to work for you? This sounds like a classic “When I was your age”-ism that creates a crappy work environment.

I’m in the IT industry, I’m a 20-something year old, and I guess you could still consider me “entry-level”. I’m not disillusioned about my place in the industry. I don’t expect you to give me the title of CTO of a Fortune 500 company. I don’t need a secretary and a personal assistant. I do however expect to be paid accordingly to the value I bring the company. Why wouldn’t someone want to be rewarded if they do outstanding work? Not having a reward doesn’t stop me from doing outstanding work. You need to find employees that hold themselves to a higher standard than you do. I personally don’t care for offices but it’s clear that having an door that shuts allows developers to be more production due to less distractions.

Just because I may be an entry-level employee, that doesn’t mean I bring any less value to the employer. What qualifies an employer to treat an entry-level employee as a second-class employee? In the IT industry, where experience seems to be king, I have struggled to understand why that is. Experience is fine and dandy but it only takes you only so far. Raw talent should be valued more. Between 3 rock star 20-something year olds and 3 mediocre experienced 40+ year olds, I will bet on the rock stars every single time.

It sounds to me that it’s not the young IT workers that are disillusioned but it’s the employers. They want rock stars employees without providing any incentive.

Re: Young IT workers disillusioned

Firefox 3.0 Beta, Web Developer, Firebug

TheoLeave a comment

I’ve recently moved to Firefox 3 on my MacBook Pro. The first thing I noticed was pretty much all of my Firefox plugins stopped working. This didn’t really bother me until I started developing on the laptop. The two things I really missed were Web Developer and FireBug.

After a little bit of googling, I was able to find other people with the same problem and fixes. While these are not official releases, they seem to be working just fine for me.

Check them out below:

Firefox 3.0 Beta, Web Developer, Firebug

Do it to it.

TheoLeave a comment

“Do it to it” was a phrase that my high school computer science teacher would say after describing the next assignment he was giving the class.

The saying has following me throughout the years. Other than being a variation of Nike’s “Just Do it” motto, I’m not really sure why I still remember it other than it encompasses what really matters when being tasked with something.

Given two options of doing something myself or having someone else do it for me, I find myself often saying that I want to do it. I think it’s just that I want the experience and satisfaction (maybe I’m a control-freak). When it comes to work, I have always volunteered to try out new things or build the next big feature. That’s the fun stuff to work on. If there’s a really difficult problem or bug, although I am hating the bug when I’m trying to fix it, in retrospect I usually feel a sense of accomplishment and pride after fixing it.

I think that’s what a lot of programmers that have passion about code have in common. We really enjoy solving problems, using that brain of ours, and building new things with code. Between the late night deploys, emergency bug fixes, and ridiculous business requests, the challenge, the sense of ownership, and the art of building software makes it worthwhile and oh so enjoyable.

So, open up your favorite IDE and do it to it.

Do it to it.