Rant

The Scrum Daily Standup

One of the hallmarks of the Scrum method of agile software development is a daily meeting, or “standup”. The purpose of the Scrum Daily Standup is to make sure the Scrum team is aware of what tasks the other members of the team are working on as well as asking for and offering assistance to other members of the team as needed. The Scrum Daily Standup is NOT a meeting to gather the project’s status. In addition, this is not a planning meeting, so the discussion of implementation details is outside the scope of the meeting, and should be handled in a separate meeting, or after the conclusion of the Daily Standup. The is typically characterized by being 15 minute long at its longest, and everyone stands during the meeting. Each speaking member of the meeting will typically answer these three questions:

How do you handle a developer that doesn't play by the rules?

Software development teams are fickle groups. It seems everyone has their own pet peeves that set them off, and a group that is cohesive and functioning well can quickly turn into one that shows little output for the time spent working.

In order to create and nurture a software development team takes leadership that understands all of the idiosyncrasies of their team members, and ensure that no one member derails the rest of the team. While some may use this as a way to discriminate against entire groups of people, if done properly, should only be utilized to maintain harmony after all hiring and performance decisions have been made.

SCRUM Sprint Planning Gone Wrong

One of the things that is a hallmark of the SCRUM method of Agile development is that you have a unit of time during which you commit to accomplishing some amount of work before that unit of time has elapsed. In order to commit to how much work should be accomplished during the “sprint”, all members of the team meet at the beginning of each sprint for a sprint planning meeting.

The Top Sign You Hired The Wrong Developer

I have been a part of the interview process at a few different companies now, and there is one thing that I have seen correlate completely with how useless a developer hire is. If the hiring manager ever brings me a resume that mentions how many conferences a candidate attends or gives talks at, I will immediately rule that candidate out for the purposes of the development position I am interviewing for.

Stop Wanting and Start Choosing

I am used to hearing people use phrases like “I want to be able to do X thing” or “I want to have X position at my company” when people are talking in generalities about their goals. I tend to do it often as well, especially when using “self-talk” to attempt to work on internal goals and desires. However, when reading a book from Paul Tough, How Children Succeed, one of the quotes that he references from Jonathan Rowson, a Scottish chess grand master who had written about the importance of emotion and psychology in chess success.

Top Job Applicants Never Stop Learning

From time to time, my job allows me to be a part of the hiring process for our technical positions. Unfortunately for some of the applicants, I repeatedly come away from these interviews amazed at the responses I get from pretty standard and basic technical questions related to Web Development.

Recently we were looking for a front-end web developer that was good at UX and design and proficient at HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. One of the things that we tend to ask everyone is to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 as to how good they are with each technology. The majority of responses are in the 5-8 range with the corresponding answers to the questions about each techology falling about in the range you would expect. A couple of applicants were brave enough to rate themselves at a 9.5 out of 10 on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, leading us to believe they were “exceptional applicants”.

Apple's iPhone Announcement is a Big Deal for T-Mobile

Every year, we are treated to a big show from Apple about what the next iPhone will be like, and how magical it actually is. In case you have been living under a rock, this major Apple annoucement is one of the largest news-making fancy press-conferences you will see these days. It used to be this way when Microsoft would launch a new operating system, remember that launch announcement and launch party for Windows XP? What about for Windows 8? Oh yeah, these announcements are only a big deal when you are the dominant force in the marketplace instead of trying to play catch-up in all areas because your technology is old.

5 Ways to Keep Your Nude Pictures Secure

With the recent revelation that there was a massive release of naked or revealing photographs of many female celebrities, it seems to be an important time to remind people how to make sure private photos and other information don’t get shared all around the internet without your permission. As a result, here are my top 5 ways to keep your nude pictures secure.

1. Don’t Take Nude Selfies - Yes, the best and easiest way to keep your naked selfies out of the sight for the public viewers on the internet is to never take a naked selfie in the first place. Just don’t do it.

   #rant #security

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Google Chrome Makes Web Developers Lazy

This post may make me sound ancient in the world of web development, but here it comes anyway.

Like Microsoft, Google has decided to implement functionality in their dominant browser that is incompatible with the other major competing browsers.

When I first started developing websites professionally, ensuring a website worked for 99% of the site’s visitors was easy, relatively, as you only needed to make sure the site worked in Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, there were a ton of random hacks and tricks required to deal with the quirks of this browser, but you were fairly safe knowing you had developed your site to be tailored to the browser of choice for your visitors. However, the dominance of Internet Explorer 6 was bound to come to an end and it ushered in an era of multiple popular browsers including Firefox and Chrome. With no single browser having a massive advantage in terms of users in all areas, web developers had to make sure that thorough testing of their sites was completed in each of the major browsers.

Links Not Working? Check AdBlock Plus

It turns out that the issues with useForcedLinkTracking are not isolated just to Safari’s popup blocker. Unfortunately, one of the most popular browser for both Chrome and Firefox, AdBlock Plus is subject to this issue as well.

One of the things that the AdBlock Plus plugin does is attempt to intercept any and all link traffic to determine whether it was created from an actual mouse click or if it was triggered through JavaScript as part of a marketing campaign. When used on a site with Adobe’s SiteCatalyst analytics with useForcedLinkTracking turned on and target="_blank" set in the hyperlink, you will trigger the issue. If you run into this issue, you can fix it by:

Write Software for People, Not Computers

Throughout a normal day, I end up reading a lot of information about current issues in technology, and today is no different. There was a debate raging about whether or not high-level math was required for programmers that was sparked by this article by Sarah Mei Programming is not math. While it is an interesting topic, and, surprisingly, I mostly agree with Sarah on this issue, that is not the most important portion of her post. The important part is instead a quote from Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs from MIT Press, and is as follows:

The Easiest Way to Create A Solution That Works

The easiest way to create a solution that works…is to do it right the first time. Yes, this is a bit of a cop-out, but it turns out to be an important factor to keep in mind when you are tempted to come up with a quick and dirty solution for a problem that does not follow established best practices and is likely to have code quality issues later.

I have run across many sections of code that I or other developers have written in the past that we thought were “good enough” at the time it was written, yet, I was revisiting the code because we discovered a bug in it. Many times, this code had an issue that would have been trivial to fix at the time it was written, if it were only found. It seems that as a developer, we tend to find the least sufficient solution that will solve the immediate problem we are experiencing instead of finding an optimal solution that will be easily maintained months and years after it was written.

Estimating Software Development Projects is Hard

As a software developer, working with non-technical management and end users to define a deadline for when a project will be ready to use or how long it will take from start to end of a project is an extremely complex task. Unfortunately, the non-technical audience thinks that it should be simple to give some sort of estimation on the fly without detailed analysis of the project and what it involves, as it seems simple for them to estimate tasks that are like ones they have done before.

Ignore Whitespace Not Available in BitBucket Pull Requests

When looking for an online location to use as the host for source code, many people by default look at GitHub, as it seems to be the most well-known option out there, and is free for open source projects. However, if you would like your source code to be kept private, or would rather use Mercurial instead of Git, GitHub may not be the place for you. Instead, I would suggest BitBucket as your source code repository provider.

Code Style Guides - Consistency is King

There have been countless flame wars online about the details of the guidelines that appear in various Code Style Guides. Some of the most famous are the tabs versus spaces arguments, whether or not to put curly brackets {} each on their own line, whether you should even use the curly brackets {} for one line actions in if statements.

I am here to say that the only thing that matters in the style of your source code, other than syntactically correct code, is consistency. When a codebase has internal consistency, developers new to it are more easily able to pick up the meaning of the source code contained within instead of having to first understand why the different styles in different sections matter, or not.

5 Ways to Do SCRUM Poorly

As a developer that frequently leads projects and operates in various leadership roles depending on the current project lineup, the Agile development methodology is a welcome change from the Waterfall and Software Development Life Cycle approaches to software development. SCRUM is the specific type of Agile development that I have participated in at a few different workplaces, and it seems to work well if implemented properly. However, there are several ways to make a SCRUM development team perform more poorly than it ought. The top 5 I have seen include:

Avoid SiteCatalyst's useForcedLinkTracking and target="_blank"

All sites rely upon some third party analytics software to track at the very least the number of visitors to a site. Many sites use Google Analytics, which provide much more information that just the number of visitors. Another option that some of the bigger sites use is Adobe Analytics, aka SiteCatalyst to enable more custom tracking options that are not evident through the Google Analytics interface.

One feature of SiteCatalyst is that it allows you to set an option useForcedLinkTracking that will track every link on your site for clicks whether or not you have setup custom tracking for the links or not. Effectively what the code does is create a JavaScript event handler to intercept all click events on the <a href="http://url.com">Link</a> hyperlinks. Once they are intercepted, SiteCatalyst sends its tracking information to its servers and then procedes to attempt to make sure that the link functions properly. Unfortunately, in some versions of the SiteCatalyst code, it attempts to create a synthetic click event that works in many cases. However, if you are using Safari with the popup blocker turned on, and a target="_blank" in the hyperlink, then it will trigger the popup blocker, which simply ignores the click, and the user sees nothing happen at all. In order to fix it, hopefully the latest version of the SiteCatalyst code will handle it, turn off useForcedLinkTracking, or, as the very last resort, convert the <a /> links to another type of element and use JavaScript to open the new window manually when listening for the click event on the new element. It seems this works all the time, but it will prevent SiteCatalyst from tracking those clicks.

Mobile Web Development Is the New Internet Explorer 6

Developing a website that works well across devices and browsers is an excersize in playing Whack-A-Mole. Once you get one browser working on a desktop browser, you go to the next browser and find that not everything works the same way. In 2014, it seems that there aren’t that many differences in functionality between desktop browsers, but that all changes once you start making a responsive website that must handle mobile devices as well as it does desktop browsers.

Magento Version 2, is it just Microsoft Windows Longhorn AKA Vista?

Magento version 2 was first introduced in 2010. It is now almost halfway through 2014, and the public has not seen any alpha or beta release of Magento version 2 as of yet. The new version of Magento promised to replace PrototypeJS and Scriptaculus with jQuery as well as reorganize the database schema to remove the slow EAV tables and migrate to a bit of a flatter table structure. However, it seems that the latest updates on the direction for Magento 2 show that the database schema will not be changed much after all.

Top 5 Ways to Make a Developer Your Enemy

Developers are known to be some of the most finicky employees you will encounter in the workplace. However, this is a list of things that will annoy or infuriate developers and non-developers alike.

1. Have the IT Manager send an email to all staff saying that all computers will have a keylogger installed. – This one is wrong on so many levels, the least of which is that it shows how little faith the company has in its employees and breeds mistrust of authority.
2. As a Manager or Team Lead, take ideas and suggestions from meetings with your team, and pass them off to upper management as your own. – This just reeks of someone that is only in it to gain more and more power.
3. As a Manager, don’t take the heat when things go wrong and blame the lowest-level employee instead. – I’ve seen senior management that is supposed to keep track of projects, ignore the project, and when it is the due date, blame those doing actual work on the project, throwing them under the bus.
4. As a new employee, on your second day of work, tell anyone that will listen or is within earshot that you are able to rewrite the entire codebase in three short months. Bear in mind, this codebase is over 7 years old and has a team of more than 20 developers working on it, but of course the newbie can rewrite the entire thing in no time flat.
5. As Management, when a developer hands in his/her resignation, schedule a meeting to try to first place a guilt trip on said employee to convince them to stay. If that doesn’t seem to work, then threaten to give the employee negative referrals if they don’t rescind the resignation and continue working for the company. Keep in mind that this occurred in a right to work state, meaning that there is no agreement in place that the employer would not wait a day or week or month and fire the employee without cause, just out of spite for wanting to work elsewhere.

These are just some of the things that will anger a software developer, so, be aware to avoid these if it matters at all to you.