What's This Blog All About?

When I was growing up in a farm community in Missouri, there was a "special" breed of folks around called Shade Tree Mechanics. Usually they were not the most reputable people in the world, but they had a knack for fixing mechanical problems and a reckless fearlessness to tinker with anything. A shade tree mechanic can be spotted by finding the pair of legs sticking out from under a beater car on blocks, surrounded by other skeletal vehicles crowding the rest of his scrubby, junk-laden yard. The beaters you see abandoned all around him aren't useless, they're fodder. He takes bits and pieces and tweaks and tunes, and comes up with a creative solution to your needs. Reputation notwithstanding, a shade tree mechanic knows how to get things running.

While I don't have any particular mechanical ability (despite a degree in mechanical engineering), I like to think that I am the developer equivalent of a shade tree mechanic . My hard drive is certainly littered with the detritus of abandoned open source projects (and one successful project here). I've had a short, but varied, path into and through the land of software development ...

• Shadow IT - Getting my feet wet writing rogue applications for my engineering team. Having a blast cowboy-coding and generating a lot of fodder for the DailyWTF. Oracle, ASP, VB, and DHTML. I moved on to be a "real" developer.
  
• Captive IT - Working in in-house IT for a Fortune 100 company designing enterprise applications. I actually got to be the technical lead and architect on a mission-critical system for my first real development project. No prior experience, no adult supervision, no problems. I described the architecture to a former colleague, and his only comment was, "You're going to spend some time in Purgatory for that one..." I also got to experience my first Death March Project, a lot of corporate politics, and secretive reorganizations. On the positive side, I learned about high availability, disaster recovery, and instrumentation, and I began to successfully apply OO design patterns and UML modeling. Our waterfall process changed often, and was enforced capriciously by a dizzying array of compliance bodies, laying in wait like 18th century highwaymen determined to ambush hapless travelers.
  
• Non-Coding Architect - The last reorganization left me a non-coding architect just as the Microsoft world was dumping the DLL Hell (think VB/COM/ASP) technologies for .NET. I got to sharpen my Powerpoint skills while decorating my cubicle walls with Dilbert cartoons. The organization simply could not resist any type of evil fad -- CMM, Six Sigma, "It's not a process, it's a framework," fuzzy-headed SOA strategies, offshoring, "programmers are a commodity," "Who Moved My Cheese?", the "Fish" book, and a matrix model (yay for dotted-line bosses). I made a half-hearted, quixotic attempt to introduce iterative and incremental processes, but no one in management cared. In order to regain some type of technical relevancy and avoid 80-some hours of mandatory CMM training, I jumped again to become a consultant.
  
• High Priests of Agile - I spent a mostly positive year and a half working in the .NET practice for an elite consulting company. Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development, Continuous Integration and .NET. Consulting is a great experience. The intellectual opportunities are abundant, and no matter how bad an assignment or client is, you can solace yourself that it's only a matter of time before you'll get to move on to a new venue. I had to learn software design all over again to incorporate TDD techniques. Besides too much StarBucks on the expense account, I got an absolute bellyful of XP theory and zealotry. If I hear, "In the white book, Kent Beck says ..." one more time, I'm going to puke. XP, and agile in general, works -- but software was written successfully before XP, and some of the older stuff (UML, Responsibility-Driven Design, Design Patterns) is more effective in certain situations. Besides, constant travel with an infant at home is a non-starter, so I left for a job close to home.
• Independent Software Vendor - I am now working for a product-development company doing .NET development with a SCRUM process. I am finally getting to make a positive impact on an organization by helping introduce TDD, CI, and new architectural ideas. Being empowered in a pragmatic and stable organization to proactively make improvements has been a ray of light after a series of frustrating positions. A ten-minute commute via a scenic backroad doesn't hurt either.

I would like to use this blog to explore my thoughts about software design, .NET development, and agile methodologies. TDD and XP practices are getting a lot of attention, but I think there is a huge gap in writing between agile theory and successful practice. In particular, I would like to share my experiences with TDD and the role of design within an agile methodology.

My name is Jeremy Miller and I am a .Net Developer and Architect in Austin, TX.