Feelings about programming katas tend to fall into one of 3 buckets; disdain, indifference, or appreciation. The indifferent crowd generally doesn't see what you learn from repeating the same coding exercise, while the disdainful crowd feels the same way, but at a much louder (and of course disdainful) volume. That leaves the group that feel there is value in repetitively coding the same exercise or coding numerous small code examples.

Working as a Software Developer* in a range of small companies and organizations, I've had the opportunity to work on quite a number of different projects. That experience has given me a healthy appreciation for how not to execute projects, as well as a healthy respect for process. Recently I pulled together a basic process to help manage the development tasks I am working on, track completion against my estimates, and a number of other things. It takes roughly an hour every two weeks and 5-10 minutes per day to maintain.

Waiting for your company to provide training courses or advancement opportunities? It might be a long wait. Unfortunately many companies overlook professional development or consistently sacrifice it when the first round of annual budget cuts occur. Even when we do get training opportunities, many of us continue to select classes at random, based on what seems interesting at the moment.

We live in a field that is expanding daily, where the environment we work in is drastically different from what it was 5 years ago and from what it will be 5 years from now. Whether we plan on being ...

Hello Everyone,

Rick here again with another little blurb on my most recent Silverlight project, KBay. Today, I'd like to write a little bit about what went right.

Separation of Power

One of the biggest attributes of KBay's success, IMO, was the segregation of development. My coworker Adam (Hi Adam!) and I handled the majority of the work for this project. The initial goal was to try to...

Which books should you read/buy when you are a programmer? I have listed 5 books that have helped me a lot. The books that I have chosen are not specific to any language although some of the books have examples in one language only. Design Patterns has examples in smalltalk and C++ but since the code is not very complicated you should have no problem converting it to your language of choice. I have included links to sample chapters for the books where I could find them. For some of the books I have also provided links to the author’s site; some of them have additional material so that...