Development Experience(s)

So, you've just listened to another episode of Hanselminutes , this time an episode where Scott interviews Kelsey Breseman about tessel.io . You're stoked! You read through the getting started documentation  and continue on to get more and more inspired perusing through the available documentation . At this point, you just want to try something out! "Let me write some awesome JavaScript and interact with the world!" The only trouble is that you don't have a Tessel board on your desk! It'll take days  from your purchase to its arrival. The horror! Fear not! Tessel Fakes will let you ... pretend that you're interacting with the real world as you learn how to best use tessel's available API. To run your script without a device, you'll need to I nstall the bits Write some code Install a support package: npm install tessel-fakes Choose whether you'd like to rename the node_modules/tessel-fakes to just tessel , or if you'd rather li

I recently got the opportunity to try out NDepend and figured I'd write about my experiences. (Before you can do anything really useful with NDepend, you need to attach a NDepend project to a Visual Studio solution (preferably one with a lot of code!) This is done by hitting the NDepend menu item, followed by Attach new NDepend Project to Current VS Solution , which will create a .ndproj file (default in the your solution folder)) Once NDepend is done analyzing your solution, it provides you a nice HTML report of the state of your code. This report includes a Dependency Graph, a Dependency Matrix, a tree map, highlighting the relative sizes between modules and more. This is nice, because you can share this view with your team when reasoning about code quality: What's even nicer, however, is NDepend's integration with Visual Studio. Once you've analyzed your solution, NDepend presents you with an Analysis Error List  and a Queries and Rules Edit  window, wor

Early this spring I was looking for suitable classes to further my knowledge in systems architecture when a colleague recommended the Sundblad & Sundblad's Architect program  (their material is in English although their page is in Swedish; classroom days are also in Swedish at present). Having a background as a Developer, taking on responsibilities as a Lead Developer and then Technical Systems Architect (or "technical designer"), I found the program's first 5 weeks to be both interesting and digestible. During these weeks, I got introduced to the state of software development , its relation to business expectations and the misalignment between the two. The course then moved on to explain various Agile approaches, highlighting that Agile projects tend to deliver better results than their waterfall counterparts, although there is still room for improvement. Next up, was requirements processing , starting off with a detailed discussion of why we need requireme