I'm running a give-away on my other blog. Atlassian are giving away a license for the Bamboo Continuous Integration server. There's also 10 Bamboo T-shirts up for grabs. Just write a few paragraphs about your best or worst build experiences ...
http://www.build-doctor.com/2009/06/16/atlassian-bamboo-giveaway
This session at Agile 2007 was very interesting. Mainly because I learned about the Gallup organisation and their focus on playing to your strengths for success.
It's not a very PC message: just do what you're really, really good at, and don't put too much time into rounding off your skills. If you're a monster programmer, don't take a detour into project management. Just keep sharpening your claws.
Anyhow, I'm taking their advice. After spending a frustrating year trying to get a bunch of developers to write .NET software more repeatably, I'm playing to some of my strengths: Unix systems administration, Ruby scripting,and dicking around with open source apps.
My new role is at Enrich Social Productions. Among other things I'm in charge of production systems, which means I get to use Puppet. In a year's time I'd like to be doing most of my admin using TextMate.
Our first project is One Click To Fame, an online talent competition. Really enjoying digging into the guts of the site and understanding the dependencies.
It's also nice to work in media again.
No longer am I something in the City. I have mixed feelings about this. Insurance seemed to be a safer occupation to have in interesting times, and I liked wearing the suits. I liked the guys I sat with, and the business in general was very interesting.
Wasn't my bag though. I can do Microsoft work, falteringly. There's a time and place for that and I don't want to be a platform zealot. But my approach is very Unix-like. I'm all about the command line, even on Windows. That wasn't a perfect fit for me, and it probably wasn't for anybody else, either.
Anyway, I learned a lot and if I can safely convey some of those lessons on my other blog I will. I'm very shortly going to be doing some interesting things with a media startup and getting my hands on production again. Without a GUI tool in sight.
I used to run my own business, fixing people's Macs and PC's. Invoices would be made in my office using a book keeping package on my Mac IIsi. Which was never where I was. Invoices would leave my corporate HQ in desperate bursts, rather than a steady flow.
If the accounting software would have supported it, I'd have used the shiny new Applescript (hey, it was 1996) to allow me to generate invoices from where I was, rather than when I got back to the industrial area where my corporate HQ was.
12 years later (and thanks to @timharding) I think I've found what I wanted. Freshbooks allows you to generate invoices and track expenses. You can buy postage credits and they will generate snail mail invoices. PDF invoices are free. If you have one or two customers, it's free.
I'm also reasonably happy with the expense tracking. It's not as good as something like Xpensr, but it works for me in the UK. Xpensr say that changing the default currency from US dollars is their most asked for feature, but it's not there yet. When they implement that I'd be very interested in using it - they lookup exchange rates at IMF rates, and automatically convert.
Blinksale was quite appealing for all this two years ago, but the competition is looking sharper all the time.
I just started a new series on the Build Doctor: Ant Refactoring.
What? Oh okay. It'll work for NAnt as well, if any of you .NET guys are still using it.
