There a lot of good point in this that I never gave thought to. I don’t believe I will be in a position to hire anyone for a while, but this chapter gives some good tips on recruitment. He makes a good point in how companies don’t get better because they are hiring the wrong people or advertising the wrong skill set etc. In my limited experience looking over job boards fr the CS field there does seem to be a lot of boiler plate style templates. I also notice that they are usually looking for x number of years experience in such and such and he is right that the number of years is not a very good judgment tool and experience. I have seen people which less time in a language that know 10 times more and are that much better than people with 10 years experience so it an uneven gauge. I also agree that companies should be involved with the community and have seen companies that do this. I use the web application meet up and go to presentations and talks by various companies in the field and they are great for networking as well as talking to potential new hires and such. It is also good to see for the person who is looking for a job in that they get to see what the company is all about and the people that work there.

Overall I think this chapter was well put together and there are a good amount of tips for the employer as well as future employees. I will probably refer back to this chapter in the future.

I like how he described the interview as a business negotiation. I never thought of it like that, but that is indeed what it is. The company has its outlooks and is looking to keep up revenue and the prospective employee that could possibly help in achieving said goals and or challenges. His points on the hiring companies perspective is good. I feel like that when hiring people you would want hem to ask questions about the company. It shows interest as well as commitment to the company in a sense because they took the time to research th place and find out things about it so they could ask questions. There are time though that maybe the questions they had were answered during the interview, but still that should be stated. There are a lot of good points, but a lot are also in my opinion common sense like paying attention to how enthusiastic the person is when talking about technology or their previous jobs and experience, as well as project thy have worked on. If you have a dull unmotivated rock sitting opposite you, you may want to end it there.

I would have never given much thought about paying attention to what the interviewers role in the company is, but he makes a good point about interviewers that aren’t developers and are instead project leads or managers. I would have never thought that might mean that developers may not be empowered to make decisions. The single interview process is also interesting and worth noting. It would not have dawned on me that the company might be in a hurry and doesn’t take the time to hire the right people. I think overall there are some great points here. I like how he describes a good interview and I couldn’t put it better myself. “A good interview is like a good an informal chat between passionate developers.” I have been on interviews like this and have been hired. They are good because both parties are at ease and it makes it easier to be open about yourself. I agree as well about it being a mistake to hire someone without seeing them code or their code at least. It can give a good glimpse at their confidence and experience as well as decision making skills and the ability to take constructive criticism. Bringing your computer I don’t think I would have thought of, but it is a good idea so they can see what tools you have and use etc. Last but not least I can’t agree more with developers must interview developers.

Overall another good chapter with a lot of good information that I will probably revisit in the near future.

One of the main reasons to implement an Agile environment I believe is that you are constantly reviewing and re-tooling the process to make it work in an efficient manner. I like how he opens with something similar to this and says something to the effect of not being tied down to a heap of documents and diagrams that were written a century ago. Technologies change fast today so what may have been good yesterday may not be good today, literally. In the author’s words Agile development provides a “quick, short feedback loop”. I understand, but I don’t understand why all companies don’t use extreme programming practices. He says that in one company they noticed a 1/3 reduction in production bugs. That is amazing and saves the company a lot of cash and it’s amazing that companies seem to value it so little as far as the book says anyway. I like his stance on how to convince a manager to use the practices by promoting the value of the methodology instead of the practice of it. That is good advice. Another thing that I was surprised by was the efficiency of automated testing, I mean I know that is a time saver and all that, but I didn’t realize the scale of its goodness. It does make sense though because as he says, “as the system grows so do the number of tests.”. Writing them before hand is a time saver and also gives you something to code to. I am not going to go into the rest of the chapter because it is a repeat of the Clean Coder. Test Driven Development, Refactoring, Pair Programming, Refactoring, Continuous integration, yada, yada, yada. I find that the book has its good points, but it is a lot of Clean Coder and I think that either one or the other should be read, but certainly not both in my opinion.

This chapter brought back memories of me and my good ole commodore 64 chopping away at te keys in basic. I only wish I had stuck with it back then, but I am glad that I got back to my roots and got back into it again. I think out of all of the chapters I relate to this one the most, but on a personal level. I like the Yogi Berra quote, “ You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going because you might not get there.” I thought I was doing what I loved at my last job until I got hurt that is. Then I was in a whole new situation and I didn’t like it. I am finally at the point that I know what I want to do and am happy with the decision, but it took a while to get here. I have been and am using a lot of his tactics. Expanding technical knowledge, attending user groups, and networking to name a few and they have been fantastic to me. Like he says a career is an investment. I am glad I am a bit older and have gained a lot of wisdom along the way so the process of changing careers has been ok, scary in a way but ok. I am doing what I love and can’t wait to put it into practice.

Well this past sprint went well. Issue NGPOC-185 was successfully fixed and our pull request was accepted, tested, and put on the live test build which is awesome. I learned a good amount by reviewing the code and trying to figure out the issue, though in the end Dan solved it. I have found it quite the experience so far. After completion of NGPOC-185 we decided to split into 2 teams which was for the better because it seems like a lot of the issues don’t need 6 people working on them, but for a start it worked out well as we were getting our feet wet. We chose issue APTS-159 to work on which they wanted the list in a form to show in order of date, newest to oldest as it was supposedly backwards. After investigating the issue and implementing a solution we found out that issue had already been fixed. Brings back memories of people not closing tickets and wasting time. In this scenario it was a learning experience, but in the real world time is money and this would have cost the company a few bucks. It is kind of nice though to see the process working and having to dig through code to figure out where an issue lies and then figure out how to implement a solution. I love troubleshooting.

We are now on 2 issues, one as our split group of 3 and the other as a whole team. We will probably only get one done possibly because time is running short. The first issue is AA-680 which is “Can’t add child to parent relationship”. The problem we believe lies in the database which we do not have access to so we are waiting on an answer from OpenMRS on this. We have found where the relationship lies in the code, but cannot do anything until we get an answer. The issue is that there is only a parent/child relationship and no child/parent relationship. In other words if a child is seen at the clinic, there is no way to add a parent to the form in the relationship drop down. It seems like in this industry, or at least this project there is more time spent waiting on clarification than anything. I understand there are different time zones and such but it sometimes seems counter productive. I guess though you can have multiple issues signed out and at least there is communication. I feel like I am learning more about how the process works than actually learning Angular, not that I am not learning Angular I just guess I thought it wold be different. That is the beauty of it though I guess.

The next issue we are now working on as a team is APTS-254 and they want a reminder to pop up 6 months after switching to a new ART line. This is another issue we are currently waiting on answers for . We have nailed down the area it is in and it seems like we need to just implement a reminder function possibly, but once again we are waiting on clarification, so it’s the hurry up and wait game I guess. It isn’t anyone’s fault it just gets frustrating because we all want stuff now and that isn’t how the world works. I feel confident that I can look at a project now and understand how things work and figure out the routing and logistics of it and that feels good. I am glad I have been able to have this experience and hop that we can get one more issue pulled up before the end of the semester which is soon.  

I have to say it seems like just after I get done with a decent chapter I move on to the next and boom! You can tell that this is an Uncle Bob series book. I am so tired of hearing the word professionalism and professional that I want to puke. I am going to keep this chapter’s blog short. Maybe it is because I have been through a lot of the scenarios he talks about that I get irritated. This chapter is almost exactly like a chapter that Bob wrote in the clean coder. Never say I’ll try and get it done because the boss takes that as you will, don’t over exert yourself or you’ll get burnt out, you can’t code good at 3am, sleeping in the parking lot and getting a horrible nights sleep is a bad idea etc. I get that it is important to learn how to say no, and not commit to something you know you can’t deliver even if it means getting that nasty look from your boss or a guilt laden trip from hell. I just think it is over done in the series. I understand that important things need to be reinforced, but I think it is over done here. I will stop ranting now, because the book does have its good points, I just am not fond if certain chapters.

I do have to say that this book seems to alternate good and bad chapters to me. This chapter I thought was informative and had some useful stuff. I agree with these guys on their stance of having clean code and working software, or being a software craftsman if you will. He hits on many things in this chapter and something stood out to me right off the bat. He said that “some organizations believe that with a good management team, deep hierarchies, micromanagement, strict process and a large amount of good documentation and the project will succeed.” One other line was that many organizations see developers as lesser skilled than the higher qualified managers. He hit the nail on the head with those two statements. I have seen this in most every industry I have worked in. They always seem to forget that us underlings are the cogs that keep the machine turning. That is not to say that good management isn’t important, I just think there is a lot of backwards thinking and it is maybe because they pay the management ludicrous numbers and they need some way to justify it?

I also thought that his stance on working software is not enough was well done and very true. I think there are a lot of hacks in every trade that thinks that good enough is ok. I firmly believe that you should take care of your code like you are looking after your garden. It needs to be weeded and groomed and fed to ripen and blossom. It is like a living being it seems to me. Especially after working on the Ampath project and seeing how projects work and the communication and all of the collaborators working together. He says the cost of dealing with bad code can make companies less competitive and I agree. It reminds me of a saying my father used to say to me, “Don’t do it half ass because you’re just going to have to do it over again and it will take twice as long as if you’d just done it right in the first place.” I can’t argue with that wisdom as I found out the hard way a few times more than I care to admit.

Over all I really enjoyed this chapter and took away some things from it. I really hope that I don’t end up working for a company like some of the nightmares he was talking about. So much about Agile development makes sense and on paper is grand, I just hope that at least some of the methods are employed when I get out there.

Well this time around the sprint seems to be getting more comfortable as far as us working as a team and getting things done as well as discussing what needs to be done and who will be doing what and the likes. It has been a rather uneventful sprint in my opinion as we did some waiting on the folks at ampath to figure out what they wanted us to do and came up with 4 issues in the Jira board for us. That was actually pretty cool to see an issues board and to see how it operates as I am sure that when I get a job in the field I will be using something similar. We had a roll of for who would get what issue because our team and another wanted to work on the same issue. We lost and got our second choice, NGPOC-185 in which there is a concern over logging out when you are in the middle of filling out a form it doesn’t save the data you had in the form and they would like a modal to pop up asking if you would like to save or not. I have been going over ampath code as well as documentation(Angular) to learn about where the issue is and how to implement a fix.

I gained some more knowledge this time writing the login and auth modules. It was a bit of my own and a bit of looking at the code when I needed to, bu I feel more comfortable with Angular, not like super but confident I can actually do stuff with it now. I have also been going through a book on Angular 2 by Pablo Deelman called “Learning Angular 2” courtesy of ACM. It is good book so far and basically covers everything needed for Angular including testing. It should help me gain more experience with the language.

There really isn’t much more I can offer, but next sprint looks like it will keep us fairly busy as we should have the issue solved and implemented and apparently there is a list of other issues for us to tackle now so things are starting to get rolling along. Until next time….