That’s a Star Wars “joke” my then six year old son told me. I do admit to laughing.
Welcome to The Year 2002
OK, it’s been a while since I last posted here. It’s been a long while. I’d like to report that I’ve been busy doing something amazing but that would be stretching the truth just a wee bit too much. Instead, I’m here to report that I’ve made a discovery that most probably made around 2002 or so.
Today, I finally broke down and tried video conferencing to do some meetings. There were two of us in the Joplin, MO office and up to five people in our King of Prussia office. We were doing a team formation meeting and a backlog selection/planning meeting. It’s amazing how much of a difference the video makes over just using the phone. And this was using web cams, Skype, and normal phones, none of that fancy stuff Cisco and others are peddling these days.
At the rate I’m going, I fully expect to be up to the year 2008 in about 6 or 7 years from now, which means I’ll be actively networking with Facebook, watching HDTV, navigating with GPS devices, browsing the web on my mobile, and driving a hybrid.
That’s The Java Way!
A quote from an email I saw come across this evening:
Otherwise, what’s the point? Pile up one xml on top of the other?
I couldn’t resist. A cheap shot at Java. I’m just bitter after being exposed to one too many Java frameworks in the past that seemed to think that “you can never have too much XML” was a mantra to proudly live by.
Quote from EC: “What are we going to do about Leia’s smoking?”
My son (EC) asked me this question after having me first sit down on the couch and then grabbing a small wooden chair for himself to sit on directly across from me. This happened when Ethan was four years old and his sister, Leia, was only several months old. It was early in the morning and EC had a rather serious look upon his face and tone in his voice. He went on to inform me that Leia had been smoking (“ciga-rats”, as he liked to call them back then) in her room and we had to do something about it before it got any worse.
Quote from EC: “So what took you so long?”
EC made this remark while interrogating one of my wife’s friend’s husband (one-on-one in our dining room) after Thanksgiving dinner. Apparently, EC was not pleased with this gentleman’s fashionably late arrival.
Quote from EC: “We make them. We don’t buy them. You should try it sometime.”
My six year old son made this remark to his Grandmother yesterday while telling her about the cookies he and his Mom were making.
An Ancient Thanksgiving Recipe
Although many of my co-workers did not believe I made the delicious dish known as squash stuffing, I will still post the recipe here as requested. I know what some of you are already thinking, “he’s like some sort of Renaissance Scrum Master.” Who am I to argue? I coach agile software development teams, write some code on occasion, invent new ways of doing software development, create new lines of clothing, and now cook fine dishes such as squash stuffing. The best part is that it’s all in a day’s work.
Without further ado, here’s the recipe for squash stuffing. Enjoy!
- 1-1 1/2 lbs. sliced & steamed yellow & green squash
- 1/2 cup finely diced onion
- 1 grated carrot
- 1/4 cup margarine
- 1 cup sour cream
- 1 can cream of chicken soup
- 2 1/2 cups Pepperidge Farm or Brownberry stuffing mix (not cube type)
Pre-heat oven to 325 degrees.
Saute onions and grated carrot in margarine. Put the sauted onions and grated carrots in a bowl and add sour cream, cream of chicken soup, squash and then mix together. Next add 2 cups of stuffing mix and mix together. Put in baking dish (the Hoover family has a special dish made of granite, quartz, and rare jewels in the shape of a hobbit’s head – good luck finding one.) Top with 1/2 cup of remaining stuffing mix.
Bake for 35-40 minutes just until hot and delicious.
P.S. One of the developers at work commented the other day that my recently injured ankle is likely a result of how large my head has become; i.e. supporting all that weight can’t be good for my ankles. I’m guessing this post will only add to support that opinion. Such is the life of the Renaissance Scrum Master.
Quote from EC: “We could put her on stilts.”
My six year old son’s response this past October after I explained to him why his request for he and his two year old sister to be a two-headed chicken for Halloween wasn’t possible due to the size differences between the two of them. As if that was the only reason.
Making The Holidays Extra Special This Year
Since my game changing book won’t likely be ready in time for the holidays, I figured I should provide the readers of this blog with a great gift to give to their friends and family this Christmas. The picture in this post is just one of many styles of shirts you can purchase with the i must be an acrobat header on it. 
As an added bonus, the back has the url to this blog on it. At first, I thought it would be tasteful to put the url on the back in fairly small type. But then, I considered those wearing the shirt and how they’d probably prefer to have the url as big as can be in order to best share their passion for this blog, me, and the clown figurine that walks across that tightrope.
I can’t vouch for the shirt personally. Although, I did purchase one for my biggest fan, who is always going out of his way to tell people that I have a blog. Some might say he’s mocking me when he does this, but I know that deep down inside he is my biggest fan and supporter. He knows it. I know it. (I’ll pretend I didn’t hear rumors of him contemplating going around downtown Philly and having various odd ball characters off the street pose in the shirt as he captures their photo.) Unfortunately, my biggest fan does not have his own blog, so I can’t point you to his gushing reviews of the shirt he received this week in the mail.
So, instead of surprising your kids with that Nintendo Wii they’ve been asking for all year long, how about you give them the gift that keeps on giving? What better way to say “you mean the world to me” then to send an i must be an acrobat shirt to all your friends? And don’t forget your co-workers. Nothing expresses your gratitude quite like a shirt that has joshuahoover.com on the back in a 200 point sized font. Go on, make this holiday season extra special.
I Think I’m Going To Write a Book
Today was a real break through. I was talking to two senior developers here at Gestalt this morning about how to test some code one of the teams in the Joplin, MO office is working on. I came up with this awesome idea that I threw out there to these two devs. I said, “We need to be able to automagically take some test data, pump it through our module, let it do its voodoo, and then compare the results with what we think we should see in the end. Oh yeah, and this should be able to run constantly, whenever someone makes changes to the code base, this kind of test should run.” They were speechless. I think it was because of my brilliance. I know, that’s not being very humble, but this is a HUGE break through I made today. I can’t blame the guys if they were in awe of a Scrum Master’s ability to revolutionize the world of software development in less than a minute of thought. I wonder if this is how Alexander Graham Bell’s colleagues felt when he invented the telephone?
This new way of testing software certainly demands a book. Imagine, being able to write tests in code that are run continuously as the code evolves. The confidence you’d have in the quality of your code would go way up. Ideally, you would write these types of tests before you write the code. BAM! Another magic moment just happened as I typed that last sentence. Write the tests before you code. WTTBYC is pretty catchy, no? I think I have the title for my first book right there: Write the tests before you code (WTTBYC). Imagine how writing tests first might help improve the design of your code. If you need to think about how you’re going to test the code it might force you to write things a bit cleaner.
I think the only thing I need to work on now is fighting off all the tech book publishers with a stick. I may need to get an agent. What a game changing day it has been!