Toronto Snowman

Stop It, a photo by sghill on Flickr.

Today we built a snowman!

It had been a long, long time since I last built a snowman. Balki fought us every step of the way, but we were able to distract him just enough to get it finished.

Happy holidays!

The Rules of Software Development

Last year I was working at a large enterprise. Over the summer we had an intern join us, who I couldn't help but show the ropes. We managed to cover several rules of software development in just a few months. After the internship wrapped up, he was nice enough to forward the notes he took while on our team:

  1. Follow your heart
  2. Never volunteer for meetings, because then you become "The Guy"
  7. If all else fails, ask your neighbor
  9. If it's final, then it should be final
 13. Decision trees
 16. Always favor something that saves you 45 seconds
 22. Assertions should assert on something
 52. Monkey patching is for the zookeeper
 72. Always try to work in a place where there are palm trees
 82. Kernel panic is rarely good
 86. If you ever see a cool test, run!
 94. It's all slashes these days
 97. Agile doesn't work if you just hear things
186. Always use an attached keyboard
763. We were talking about splitting purchase orders, 
     they were talking about revision history, 
     now they're talking about splitting purchase orders 
     with revision history, and that's why agile works!

All the best, Michael! This advice will carry you far.

GiftIdea! 1.1.0

After shipping GiftIdea! on the Play Store last week, we were excited. For good reason too; without any prompting, we've received three 5-star reviews from our nine users. I'm optimistic, especially considering we're only available to about 2/3 of the Androids out there.

A number of folks asked if this would run on the iPhone or if an iPhone version is coming. There aren't currently plans for that. The idea is produce a high-quality Android app, while learning and sharing all the great lessons that I'm sure will come with it.

There are a handful of things on the table for future releases, but we're starting with two small, visible changes:

1. Recipients now show the number of active gift ideas
2. Editing an idea has different "hint" text

Under the hood there were 28 changes from the last release.

Happy Gifting!