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Archive for October, 2007

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MSSU Follow Up

Sunday, October 28, 2007

On Thursday, October 25th, I spoke to the CIS club at Missouri Southern State University. The presentation won’t win any awards (no presentation of mine ever will.) I put the Powerpoint up on SlideShare. I promised the students and professors in attendance that I would follow up with a post on my blog with links and other info that might be helpful.

Internships
If you’re interested in an internship with Gestalt’s Joplin office, please send your resume to my email address: jhoover at gestalt-llc.com. I’ll make sure your resume gets to the right people within Gestalt.

Agile Software Engineering
Some of the agile software engineering best practices I mentioned during the presentation were Test Driven Development (TDD) and Continuous Integration (CI). Since MSSU is focused on .NET, here are some links that might be helpful related to TDD and CI:

YouTube Videos
Coco had asked how Gestalt was using YouTube. I mentioned that we used it as part of a recruiting effort. We had a contest open to the employees to see who could make the coolest recruiting video on YouTube. The results of that contest can be found here. The winner (as voted on by Gestalt employees) was John Moffet’s PatrolNet Woes. In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’m embedding my video below.

Recommended Read
A book I’m in the process of reading that I think would be extremely beneficial for college students to read is My Job Went To India. I’m about a third of the way through and the advice is practical and especially relevant for those entering the IT workforce these days.

RSS
There were some questions about RSS during the presentation. May I suggest checking out the Gestalt Blogs RSS feed? This feed has all the posts from Gestalt bloggers, with quite a few being out of the Joplin office. My personal favorite combo for subscribing to and reading RSS feeds is Firefox and Google Reader.

Open Source
Below are the links to all our current Open Source projects:

JBI Binding Components
- RSS BC
- SIP BC
- UDDI BC
- XMPP BC
Other Gestalt Open Source Projects

Remember to look into joining an Open Source project. While I don’t have any specific recommendations on projects to join (other than our own!), I can definitely recommend reading the book Producing Open Source Software. You can get a free PDF and HTML version of the book.

Topics: Agile, Open Source, Software Development, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Quote from EC: “She would be dead. And we would have to bury her. And then we’d be annoyed.”

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

My six year old son’s commentary on why his two year old sister should not lean up against the window screen and fall out.

Topics: EC Quotes | No Comments »

Mercy! (i.e. WordPress Upgrade)

Monday, October 15, 2007

Tonight I decided to upgrade this blog to the latest and greatest version of WordPress. I originally went down the path of following the upgrade instructions when I realized that it was kind of crazy to do so when there is the option of using Subversion. The problem with the traditional upgrade is that it requires you to manually copy a lot of files over from the old install like any of your plugins, themes, uploads, etc. By using the Subversion option I can now update to the latest stable version of WordPress by running a single svn command. I like that a lot better.

Topics: Misc | 1 Comment »

Communicate

Tuesday, October 9, 2007

Pinky and The Brain...communicate? After the past two days, I felt the need to post this:

To convey information about; make known; impart: communicated his views to our office.
To reveal clearly; manifest: Her disapproval communicated itself in her frown.

American Heritage Dictionary definition of communicate

Topics: Misc | No Comments »