Book: Getting Started in Consulting

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/book_getting_started_in_consulting.htm]

I just finished a very good book - Getting Started in Consulting. As its title suggests, it explains how to start up your own consulting practice. While I am personally entrenched in industry at Paylocity and not heading towards consulting, the book is still very applicable. (I used to work in consulting at Deloitte and CSC). Essentially, the developers who really stand out do a lot of the same things that successful consultants do - they take initiative to add value in a way that supports the client.

 

As someone now in industry, my "client" is usually my boss, or the customers who purchase our product. My "fees" are usually how I get to spend my time - i.e. I need to justify to my boss that project X is worth the time investment, and they should therefore allot schedule resources for it. The chapters on sales and marketing are good for any developer to know because they remind you that ultimately the project needs to generate revenue. It's easy to think that money grows on trees for these corporate giants, but for many of us, good projects often come down to a series of small "sales". Alan does a great job of showing how to incrementally add value and handle scope creep.

 

He also has very applicable chapters on "Moving to the Next Level" and "What do you do with Success?" For developers, if you've been in the field for 10 years, are you just doing more same old features, or are you still professionally growing and contributing back to the community via mentoring, publications, user groups, or other extra curricular activities?

 

It's an easy read, a well done book, and stimulates your mind to think about how to add value for your current project in industry.

Merry Christmas

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/merry_christmas_1.htm]

Merry Christmas for 2007, and a happy new year coming up in 2008!

 

Generic Dictionary in C#

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/generic_dictionary_in_c.htm]

I love the generic Dictionary class. It's located in the System.Collections.Generic namespace. This class is like a strongly-typed hash table (which lets you reference objects as key-value pairs). You can specify the type for the key and another type for the value. This code snippet below shows how to create, add, and retrieve data from a Dictionary. It spares the developer from writing a bunch of extra conversion wrapping code.

    [TestMethod]
    public void Dictionary_1()
    {
      Dictionary<string, DateTime> group = new Dictionary<string, DateTime>();

      //Add based on separate variables
      string strKey1 = "abc";
      DateTime dt1 = DateTime.Now;
      group.Add(strKey1, dt1);

      //Add as single line
      group.Add("def", new DateTime(2005, 12, 25));

      //Should now have 2 items
      Assert.AreEqual(2, group.Count);

      //Get value given key
      DateTime dt2 = group["abc"];
      Assert.AreEqual(dt1, dt2);
    }

Generics are great. You can also use them for strongly-typed lists, setting the return type of a method, and many other techniques that simplify code.

Tips to overcome problems with learning

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/tips_to_overcome_problems_with_learning.htm]

Although it's common knowledge that you need to invest time and effort to learn, the question is how to maximize that investment. Certainly you will encounter problems at every step of the way, such as:

• Staying motivated.
• Not feeling overwhelmed.
• Finding time to learn despite being busy.
• Learning the right stuff.
• Retaining what you do learn.
• Getting to use your new hard-earned knowledge.

Here are some random tips to dealing with those problems. Obviously a lot more could be said about each one; this is just a partial brain dump - and isn't that what blogs are for?

Problem	Ideas for Solutions
Staying motivated	Work on what you personally care about Reflect on your accomplishments
Not feeling overwhelmed	Make reasonable goals Focus on smaller chunks
Retaining what you do learn	Summarize your new knowledge Put it in easy-to-find places Practice it hands-on
Learning the right stuff	Continually try at everything, and eventually you’ll hit the jackpot (This will also increase your learning ability such that you’ll be ready when you get the chance). Invest time outside of your required learning to explore the topics you want.
Using your new hard-earned knowledge	Pick topics that assist with your personal goals, so regardless of what happens at work you'll still get to use it. Hang out in communities that value the same knowledge.
Finding time to learn despite being so busy.	Use the dead parts of the day (like driving or waiting in line) to mull over ideas. Use smaller chunks of time instead of waiting for an entire free day. Even in seasons when you’re just trying to survive (and hence are not doing any new studying), you can still learn better character like patience and determination.

 

Twenty excuses to avoid learning

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/twenty_excuses_to_avoid_learning.htm]

I was thinking the other day of all the excuses that I've heard for my software developers avoid trying to learn new things. I'm a huge advocate of developers doing continuing education, so I always find the excuses interesting. Here's a random list of the top twenty:

1. I’m too old / I’m too young.
2. I’m not smart enough.
3. I don’t need anything new / I don’t care.
4. But my memory is too bad…
5. Even if I learn something new, it won’t help me.
6. I don’t have the technical job yet. First I’ll get the job, and then I’ll learn about it.
7. The technology will just be obsolete by the time I learn it.
8. I’ll just wait until some teaches me.
9. Learning is punishment for being bad - i.e. the grade-school mentality when you're teach assigns extra homework to "punish" you.
10. The instructor dislikes me, therefore I won’t try.
11. The techniques/resources aren’t available.
12. My environment is unfair, so why put myself on the line when it’s setup against me.
13. Training is too expensive
14. It’s too overwhelming
15. It’s my boss’s responsibility to train me
16. I don’t even like my job, why would I want to learn more about it? (Rebuttal: then learn about another job, the job you want).
17. I don’t want to waste effort learning something unless I absolutely need it.
18. If I learn some niche tech, then I’ll get stuck maintaining that obsolete system.
19. I worked really hard before, and nothing good came from it.
20. It’s not worth it.

Are there other ones that you've heard? At some point, I'd like to offer explicit rebuttals to each of these.

Resources for learning software development

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/resources_for_learning_software_development.htm]

I was thinking the other day how many different resources are out there to help someone learn software development. There's something to appeal to almost every style:

1. Books
2. Reference docs
3. Articles
4. Webcasts
5. Podcasts
6. Virtual labs
7. Newsgroups, discussion forums
8. Live Events
9. Professional Groups
10. Blogs
11. Training (class room setting)
12. Sample code - quickstarts
13. Sample code - real projects
14. Tutorials & Walkthroughs
15. Local class at community college
16. Bachelors or Master’s degree
17. Teaching others (forces you to learn it)
18. Write your own blog
19. Personal pet projects
20. Open source projects
21. Your coworkers. A physically present person, who can look at your machine environment, can be the best way to learn.
22. Private tutor – perhaps for introductory topics where such tutors are much more abundant.
23. Certification

Any others that you've personally found helpful?
 

Architecture: Keeping it non-exponential

[This was originally posted at http://timstall.dotnetdevelopersjournal.com/architecture_keeping_it_nonexponential.htm]

Systems have a tendency to get more disordered. Architecturally, it's easy to always take shortcuts such that your application code becomes one big mess of tightly coupled objects and duplicated code. It starts innocent enough -you have only a few initial components, and each one has a dependency on the others. So that's still only a few dependencies.

But then, a few emergencies later (and what isn't an emergency?), your code has ballooned, and the dependencies have exponentially exploded into a mess. The project has accrued so much technical debt that the schedule is hopeless, and it's no longer fun. Every object is intertwined with every other object:

A much more sustainable model is to demand cleaner code at each step of the way, and end up with something maintainable, which the number of dependencies increases linearly with the number of new components. This lets you add, remove, and modify the code much more easily:

I see this as one of the basic issues of architecture: keeping the ever-growing code base in a maintainable state. In application development, this often boils down to conscious decisions where everyone "knows" the right way, but instead write sloppy code for ("we don't have time", "we'll fix it later", "this one won't hurt", "it works", "the maintenance team will fix it", etc...). Often, it seems like the team just needs a strong and credible voice to encourage everyone to do the right thing. Especially for long-term, enterprise projects, this seems like the optimal way to go. It sure beats having 12 months of garbled code.