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Practices of an Agile Developer authored by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt; copyright 2006.

When the above book was suggested to me, I was less than thrilled. Jumping to the conclusion that this was going to be dry reading; I was more than surprised to say that I was completely wrong!

This isn’t your typical text book. Subramaniam and Hunt have written a great book that introduces what agile development is and how to implement it successfully. Introducing real life situations and how to respond in an agile way, gives the reader a way to connect with the concepts being delivered. This book keeps your attention by throwing in a little programmer humor, too.

Focusing on more than the way programmers should act, these authors shed light on the little devil inside us. Giving us responses that either we’ve done or know someone that has responded in a negative way. This book puts an immediate stop to the little devil inside us and explains the benefit of responding in agile and positive way.

At times, I felt the book touched on “duh” points like “Listening to Users” or “Keep it Simple”. Revisiting these basic concepts was a great reminder that from time to time I have found myself guilty of breaking these rules. Losing sight of these basics can put a cramp in your teamwork skills.

Other than hitting the basics, this book also touches on working with others, writing bug free code, and conducting quick and effect meetings. Giving you actual tips to perform at work and how to implement these tactics even if you’re not in a leadership role, is another great feature enclosed in this book. It’s not just theory.

After reading this book we started using Agile in our two person web development shop. I plan to follow this post up with others on how we are using agile and what is or isn’t working for us. I may be a beginner to agile development, but I can’t wait to encourage and show others how to effectively use this great tool.

I’ve been told this is one of those books every developer should read. Have you read it? What are your thoughts?

Filed under: Reviews   Tags: Best Practices, Social Networking,
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Today I learned the hard way that your data isn’t always safe.

I created an Admin interface for one of my clients that basically manages an Image Gallery. The gallery allows for a Category and SubCategory structure.

I received a call at about 10:30am asking where all of his images were?  After doing some investigating, my heart stopped, I found the bug.

I had a bug in my SubCategory_Delete proc that didn’t have the WHERE SubCategoryId = @SubCategoryId clause. When a user would delete a SubCategory it would delete all the photos in the image gallery instead of just the photos in that specific SubCategory.

My initial thought was to get the backup.  Well it turns out backups aren’t created automatically.  This is something you need to manual do when creating a database.

I was fortunate enough to have a great Customer Service rep, Sean Fox, that somehow managed to convince MOSSO’s IT team to create a backup for me from their disaster recovery backups.  Thanks MOSSO.

So after first going to my client with my tail between my legs I was able to go back to him as a hero. “Your data has been saved!”

I’ve since put in place a backup plan for all of my databases hosted at MOSSO.  I found this article in their Knowledge Base: http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=346 for MSSql. There is one for MySql, http://help.mosso.com/article.php?id=356.

I modified it a bit by creating a console app that is scheduled nightly and ran on my server.  This way only I can execute the backup.

My advice is to put this in place before you need it, not afterwards.

Filed under: Web Development   Tags: Best Practices, Hosting, MSSQL, Rackspace Cloud,
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