Last night's meeting of the Engineering Managers' Support Group at the British Bankers' Club was an intimate affair, as inclement weather kept a lot of members home. Those who did brave the rain thoroughly enjoyed the atmosphere, drinks and pub food–the engineering of the Tuna Nicoise, pictured, drew quite a bit of praise.
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JetBrains has graciously donated two software licenses to be raffled off at tomorrow night's meeting of the Engineering Manager's Support Group, so come on out if you're feeling lucky. Winners can choose from several JetBrains offerings, including IntelliJ and ReSharper. These products retail in the $250-$350 range for individual licenses.

We'll be meeting at the British Bankers' Club in Menlo Park tomorrow evening, Thursday, January 21st, at 6:30 pm. The event is free with a cash bar and full menu available. You can RSVP here.

Proponents of agile, in my experience, can be quite passionate, and it can be argued that their infectious enthusiasm is what is making agile so "hot" these days. These agile evangelicals have spread practices, and an ethos, that have made a lot of developers' lives a lot happier, and bless them for it.
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Pair programming and code review are each practices that improve the quality of software, as well as promote knowledge sharing. When the Agile vs. Lean, XP vs. Scrum, and vi vs. Emacs debates get slow, developers have been known to debate the merits of pair programming vs. code review.

I have worked with teams that used each of these practices to great advantage, as well as teams that used the both. Not surprisingly, the teams that used both practices had the cleanest code and the fewest problems with customer-reported bugs.

Theodore Nguyen-Cao described code reviewers as chickens, and paired programmers as pigs. I found the analogy interesting, and so I wrote
this article for
InfoQ.

Cheers,

Chris

If you haven’t heard of
Jonathan Coulton yet, now you have. He’s clever, geeky, and his music lends itself to great videos. This one is ‘Code Monkey’.

As a special bonus, here is ‘Mandelbrot Set’.

Developers commonly break user stories into tasks to facilitate distributing the implementation work across the team, and allow tracking of progress at a finer level of granularity. It seems perfectly logical.

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