Owen's Blog

So tomorrow morning i catch the redeye flight to Auckland to be at Code Camp and give a talk on the ASP.net MVC Framework. I’m hoping it goes down well, I’ve tried to aim it at just slightly above the beginner level, touching on Routing, Views, IoC and some more Contrib stuff, Filters, and JavaScript/Ajax support.

The talk runs for an hour and starts at 1:30 p.m., I’m looking forward to seeing the talks before mine and then of course Scott Hanselman’s talk straight after mine, oh and not forgetting “Silverlight for Developers” by Jonas Folles. All things going well it should be a good day of geeking out.

Then on Monday it’s time to move on to TechEd proper, I never like to schedule my time in advance (probably much to the annoyance of the people who have to work out what room to put things in) the CommNet solution that MS put up to let you look at the schedules is just too different to the mental model of the way i look at the conference, I tried it once and realised I’d missed half the talks i really wanted to go to. So no, instead I’ll be taking a more ad hoc approach and going where i want, often the breakout sessions are more valuable anyway.

I’ll be wearing my Xero badge so people know who i am, just come and tap me on the shoulder if you want to say hi, I’m always looking to meet new people (or old friends if any of you are there).

I’ll be at the bloggers dinner on Monday night and TechFest on Tuesday too so come find me and we can talk about BDD/Mocking… seriously that’s the kind of thing i end up talking about, but I’m not all that boring.

Anyway here’s to a good conference, as per last year I’ll try and do some in conference reviews.

Ok so this is a bit of a plea.

I’ve a week or so to work on my CodeCamp presentation “MVC and Me” (ok so would have been cooler to link to flight of the navigator but that’s too hard for me to pull off) and I’m still trying to gather as many ideas about what people want to know as possible.

So if you want me to be your research guinea pig  just leave a comment to say what you would love to see covered. Nothings out of the question but I do only have an hour and a week to prepare along with some really hectic work schedule at the moment, I suspect I’ll be writing a lot of the talk during my time in Sydney when I should be saying hi to my dad, my aunty, my brother and future sister in law and most importantly my new niece.

I’m determined to make it the best talk there, and seeing as I’m on the same billing as Scott Hansleman, I think I might have set myself a high bar, nothing like shooting for the moon.

Also I think we might be organising a tweetup during TechEd.

In a forthcoming book (before you ask I’ve no idea what the title is) there’s a little case study about the first project i ever truly worked on as a developer. The project and the team have some of my fondest memories, and I’d want to work with any of the people in the small team i worked in.

One of the things that made us such a close knit group was forcing ourselves to spend an awful lot of our time pair programming. The value from this is actually too large to describe, although there is an immediate draw back that means I’ve not really been able to find a work place that encourages it as much.

• Working closely with each other is actually very good for morale. It makes you want to go to work and help out your friends.
• No knowledge is held by just one person, all decisions are made by two and all work is done by at least two.
• There’s a lot less head scratching time, with two people ideas can be bounced around quickly, and only the important, hard to decide factors are “sent upstairs” to decide on. Also if one person looses track, the other will generally be able to prompt.
• Mistakes are weeded out early

I can’t speak highly enough of pairing, although it takes a lot of buy in. However there are moments when pairing can actually be quite tiring and frustrating. We found moments when both sides of the pair wanted to get work done quickly and were in “the zone” we actually preferred to split up for a while and work separately. We called this the “Split and Sprint”.

The moral? always be pragmatic about your techniques but realise the value in what you have. We always came back to pairing, both of the pair would eventually tire and need the support of the other to check over work/tests or just to give them a point in the right direction.

Ok I just had to cheat an make up a reason to post. But this is my 300th post, this blog has been going for more than 5 years (25 Feb 2003 was my first post, those heady days of university). that’s 1992 days, so an average of one post every 6.64 days. (my goodness that’s less than a post per week).

In that time I have been through 5 jobs and finished a university degree, been in 2 countries and moved house 7 times.

I’m sure there’s some other interesting facts I can pull up about the time since I started this weblog, but one of the more interesting ones is that I’ve been going longer than our esteemed leader Rod, who recently decided to give up on blogging.

I’ve got a lot of sympathy for that, I’ve battled the same feelings, albeit that I’ve never been close to as prolific a writer as Rod. But I’ve always decided to persevere.

Two main reasons

1. This blog is for me and no one else, sure others read it (I think) but the primary audience is me. I still look back on key posts and remember what my life was like, or how many options I had, it allows me to study the past and use the lessons into the future.
2. I’m not a very good writer. This might sound a bit of a reason not to write, but on the contrary I think it’s the prime reason to keep practicing, hoping that one day my brothers skills with rub off and I can write almost as well.

So this is now officially a milestone.

here’s to the next 5 years.