NY Alt.NET April meeting

Last Wednesday's NY Alt.NET meeting topic was Continuous Integration. Being a ThoughtWorker and had worked on build and deployment project at an enterprise level, it fells naturally to me to not only prepare the presentation material but also present it.

I was a bit nervous about the presentation, as it has been a while (over a year) since I last stood up in a group setting and presented. But I think it went fine, though of course there are always improvement to be made.

I also have the honour of speaking at Philly Alt.NET meeting on May 5th. The topic is on iPhone development for .NET developer. It is something completely different and still pretty new to me.

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April 27, 2009 0

WTFJHTOE?

Don't know what that stands for*? Watch Alex Blumberg and Adam Davidson from NPR's Planet Money explain our economic crisis on KCRW

*WTFJHOTE = WTF Just Happened To Our Economy?

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April 21, 2009 0

UX disaster

The elevator company in the ThoughWorks office building (e.g. Viacom building @ 44th St) needs an user experience designer. Who in the right mind would put different door controls on each side of the elevator?

User Experience disaster - Left hand side controls

User Experience disaster - Right hand side controls

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March 25, 2009 3

Alt.NET Seattle ’09

Couple of weekends ago, I was at Redmond for the Alt.NET Seattle conference. As this was my second time there, I was no longer a Open Space/Alt.NET virgin. Just like last year, an amazing amount of discussions were packed into two full days. It was very difficult to pick which sessions to attend, having to decide whether to sit in a technical discussion or a meta-discussion. But with so many people recording videos, it is almost possible to not miss anything. We are not quiet there yet, but I am sure in the future every session would be recorded/streamed in some manner.

Ward Cunningham Keynote

Ward Cunningham showed us the work he did during his time with the Eclipse project on unit testing on a new level of complexity. He calls it SWIM and was implemented in PHP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript. He proposed to start a new open source project to implement the same concept in .NET. This create enough interest to spawn off a separate session later this weekend. (The test case runner was provisionally named Swim Runner. Personally I think it should be named Swimmer!)

Encouraging Open Source in .NET

Last year in Seattle, a similar session was convened to discuss how to create more buzz and interest in open source projects in .Net space. This year’s session centered around how we can get more open source projects to start, worked on, and succeed. Scott Hanselman hosted this session and asked what the community can do. Should Microsoft give Oren Eini a mail-order bride so he can finish LINQ-to-NHibernate? (Joke) What about OSS projects adaption by VB.NET developers?

.NET/Mono on Mac, Linux, and iPhone

Miguel de Icaza of the Mono Project hosted the session. He showed us the tooling and technique to develop iPhone app/game using the Mono stack on the Mac. He also demonstrated autogeneration of linux bootable image with pre-configured apps. (Side observation #1: only a few people at last year Alt.NET Seattle had iPhones, this year very few people has phones that *isn’t* an iPhone. Since this year’s event was just before MVP Summit, there are lots of MVPs there with iPhones! Just to show loyalty does not lie with brand but usability! #2: Less than 1/3 of attendees aware of Twitter last year, this year, very few are *not* on Twitter.)

Why so mean?

Hosted by Scott Hanselman. We explored why there is an perception of elitism in the software developer community. Why C# developers talk down to VB.NET developers, why average Microsoft developers are dimmed un-savable. This discussion led to a new session on Sunday about teaching, ALT.NET Pedagogy.

Oxite Retrospective #2

When the Oxite project (a sample blogging engine created using ASP.NET MVC framework) was put up on CodePlex, it created a huge controversy in the Alt.NET community. This is the second part of the retrospective on the project and the aftermath. One of the Oxite team member from Microsoft joined us on Sunday and gave his point of view from the inside.

When to use F#?

With F# being the first class language within the Visual Studio ecosystem, functional programming is gathering more interest. When is functional programming be appropriate for a .NET project? What type of problem would it solve better than plain old C#/VB.NET? Why not just use F# for everything?

Abstract Test Assertions

The ASP.NET MVC Contrib project relies heavily, of course, on TDD. An interesting problem arise when contributors want to develop using different unit testing framework. This session explored the idea of abstracting test assertions so that any frameworks can be used for the project, and what technique should be employed to achieve that.

I’ve recorded all these sessions on video for those who couldn’t attend. Scott Hanselman also streamed live via Kyte.tv for a number of sessions. My videos can be viewed on Vimeo, with the rest of video links on the Alt.NET wiki.

March 12, 2009 0

Dentist and Power Distance Index

I went to the dentist for a checkup today for the first time in over 2 years. First of all, I am not one of those 'I hate/scare of dentist' type person. All those drilling and cleaning implements don't scare me at all. What I don't welcome is the pushy dentists who always want to me to have some operation or other, despite how unnecessary it may be. For example, the last few dentists I visited always commented on the slightly impacted wisdom teeth I had, and how I should have them taken out "just in case". The first time I was told, my thought was "Why?" They are not causing me any problem now. Why can't I have them out if and when they become a problem? Funnier still, the last dentist suggested that I had all of my wisdom teeth taken out, and at his office! Ah, no thanks!

Anyhow, I came to expect this line of upsale-ing whenever I visit a dentist. Imagine my surprise when I visited a new dentist today and he did not even mention the wisdom teeth, let alone trying to sale me some operations. But that was not what really impress me today. The singular event that increases my trust in this dental office was when I was with the oral hygienist. She was just about to check out the health of my gums and asked a nurse to jot down the result. Nothing new there and the conversation went something like this:

Hygienist: 432

Hygienist: 433

Hygienist: 322

Nurse: It's for number 3?

Hygienist: Yes

Hygienist: 333

Hygienist reached for some tools and shifted position.

Hygienist: Are we on number 5?

Nurse: Yes, number 5

Hygienist: 223

And so on.

If you are familiar with flight operations, you will notice the similarity where the captain will call out an item on the checklist and the first officer will respond, verbally, back to ensure the right action is performed.

What advantage does this system bring?

First, there is no implicit assumption on what action each person is performing. There is periodic checkpoint to ensure both the hygienist and the nurse are recording the data for the correct tooth. Second, and more important in my view, is the low Power Distance Index (PDI) between the hygienist and the nurse. The data recording is not a dictation where the hygienist called out the result without pause and the poor nurse struggles to keep up.

Outliers: The Story of Success

I first came across Power Distance Index (Wikipedia) in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers, where he described high PDI being a factor in a string of Korean airline crashes. He went on to suggest that low PDI tends to lower the incidence rate because the subordinate is more willing to challenge the superior and thus prevents errors to occur or develop into disaster.

Coming back to my dental hygienist experience, my confidence in this dental office increase dramatically when I observed the low PDI between the hygienist and nurse, because I could see they care about patient welfare. Whether they knowingly implement this system to lower the PDI or just happen upon it, I don't particularly care. I only care that they care about me.

And the result is that the hygienist achieved something her peers had not managed in over a decade. Namely, gain my trust to the point where she convinced me to floss!

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