Javascript Compression

A quick note of a nice tool for us javascript developers.

The Dojo toolkit team has their own Javascript Compression tool that is available online at

http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/shrinksafe/

On my (modest) site Justise.com I have one larger Javascript file for my start menu from those guys at Milonic that I wanted to compress and here is the screenshot of the results.

You can see the results are quite impressive.

Jingle Bell Run

Amazingly it looks like the run results will be posted online the 22nd of December.

Links on the official website.

I know this is short of monumental news, but it looks like a lot of readers are searching for these results. So I thought I’d post it.

Some links to checkout

To solve your case of the Mundays

Dzone.com – A compilination site of diffrent articles by fellow developers for other developers.

Prototype documentation – Prototype is a javascript library that makes javascript a bit easier to use. Its hard to find good Prototype documentatio, so this site is a treasure trove.

Best of the Best 2.0 – The best 2.0 applications out there, grouped by category.

Javascript Libraries – My secret stash of libraries that make me seem like I’m uber productive, but really I’m just using other peoples hard work.

Balls of Fury! – For your viewing pleasure. Fun stuff.

That should keep you busy for weeks.

Holiday Happenings

I had mentioned earlier that my girlfriend (forever known as Danielle) and I were going to the John Pizzarelli concert at the Benaroya Hall. That concert was last Friday and it was amazing. Its easily one of the best times I’ve had at Benaroya. Pizzarelli uses a jazz quartet to liven and compliment the always wonderfull seattle symphony.

The only negative is that John Pizzarelli himself provides the vocals, and his voice doesn’t have the range to do the classics justice.

Danielle and I also ran in the Seattle Jingle Bell run, a quick 5k jaunt through downtown. I wasn’t able to break an 8 minute mile, but it was crowded, and had some hills so at least I have excuses. I provided my NikePlus report for the run, this tool really is great and if your a fringe runner that needs motivation, seeing your results certainly helps.

Self Evaluation

So its that time of year again.

My experiences with this practice are limited, as I have only had to fill out one of these before in my professional career. So my maturation process in writing these documents needs to be quite substantial this year.

Last year I took my usual timidness into my self review, trying to be meekly honest about my performance, modest about my skills and positive twoards the company. In my meeting with my manager, it turned out be a decent review overall, I had just gone through a nasty development cycle smelling pretty good and so they had positive things to say about my performance.

This year, I’ve been bitter about somethings for quite a while and took my self review as my opportunity to really chew into the meat of these issues (In addition to a few asses). I can’t tell you about the post review meeting with my manager yet as I haven’t had it, but I do want to go over some of what I put into it and my afterthoughts.

• Slightly Jovial

On some of the sections I just didn’t feel like making comments, how much do I really need to say about how good I am at Teamwork? Heck I said I was good at teamwork last year, and I think the manager downgraded my grade, so on these fuzzy topics, who really cares what goes in there?

So for better or worse, I made a few light hearted comments. I’m hoping they won’t think I just didn’t give a serious review, because I was quite serious, but I just didn’t feel that anymore needs to be said.

• I’m so good.

So in our review we have a few sections like Quality, Teamwork, Attitude, etc, that you need to grade yourself as either Exceptional, Strong, or needs Improvement. Now if your being reviewed–and lets be honest, we know money is on the line here–and you need to rate yourself, why would you put anything less then a glowing review of yourself? If you seriously need help with something, I could understand, but if your strong in any subject why would you not rate yourself Exceptional and have your manager bring down to what their ratings of you are.

• Give me my 10 things

My employer really is great to work for, they do so many wonderful things that it almost seems wrong to be critical of them. Yet things aren’t going to change without some kind of push, and this review was the perfect time to launch such a push.

If you want to know what I mentioned, go read this post.

• Help me, help you.

I know I still haven’t blogged about my adventures to a become a senior dev, but that quest is not dead. I did want to let my employeer know that they have not given me any indication what areas I need to improve upon, so I’m kind of flying blind. I’m thinking I’ll learn the cool stuff that is out there, make sure I pretend to be a senior dev and think happy thoughts.

I’ll post a follow up once I’ve had my meeting. I would love to hear about some of your experiences of self evaluations. Did anything work really well for you?

Lets get a conversation going: Scrum style

Implementing Scrum has setup a new forum at http://www.implementingscrum.com/forum/! I know its kinda empty right now, but I think it’s a really good idea to get this thing going strong, so lets all band together and post our brilliant thoughts. (Or mundane if your not quite as brilliant as I am.)

False Start

So at our company we are utilizing the Scrum development process. As currently only my friends are reading this blog, and none of them have any clue what Scrum is, I feel I must include the obligatory short description of what Scrum is.

Scrum is a management system that says a team works for 30 days on the most important tasks for the product. At the end of those thirty days, you should have a finished product that your ready to ship, which is harder then it sounds. Anyway, back to what this has to do about me.

Today, at our daily stand up meeting, before I even knew what was happening, our sprint was canceled. We are a little stretched thin personnel wise and bodies from our team (namely me) were needed elsewhere to help keep the company on track. There are two ways to take this, one, being that this is a knee jerk reaction by the company to throw resources at their problem. The other is to think of this as addressing a problem in its infancy so that there is not a major screw-up down the road.

Currently I’m on the latter, but others on the team were of the opinion it was the former. This change seems like something an Agile company should be able to accomplish, but in my view, software development is just not able to be truly agile. Going from one task to another, requires huge amounts of knowledge transfer, gathering a mental image of the structures and environment this task. With this built in margin of time between switches, is it possible for a programmer to be all that agile? Is he not more lumbering?

So if we thought of developers instead of agile lithe dancers, but lumbering mainframes, would we be more cognisant of the productivity and limits of a developers output?

A Cyber Monday Update

• I’m not a movie reviewer, if I’m dead set on liking a movie, I’m damn well gonna like it. I saw the trailer for Happy Feet long ago (last year) and really loved it. Ever since then I’ve been really excited to see this movie.  Since this is just just a bullet point update, I’m going to summarize my opinion of the movie as such. Great movie, really funny, would recommend it to all.

• The next great movie is 300 March can’t come to soon. Though I’ve heard the new Bond is really good.
• The amount of Martial Arts movies coming out is really disappointing me.

• A follow up from my last post…

Hey! Look, a Blogroll on the side bar, I wonder what thats for? It has an OPML import feature, hmmmm. Eureka!

• SNOW! Its snowing here in Seattle, and worse its wet on the roads, and now below freezing, so the roads have turned to ice. Wonder if I’m going to work tommorow.

My daily reading

To follow up the last post, I thought I would list just the main sites I go to for my daily reading. (Excluding my RSS feeds, which would be a rather large list that I just don’t feel like formatting at the moment.)

Shouldn’t there be some way for me to export my entire list from Google Reader, then format it in a view friendly manner for others to view? Yes no? Hmm, I need to look into that. During a few minutes of research, I’ve found you can publicly share posts that you think are interesting, so check my Shared Page (link also available in my blog roll section)  on google reader from time to time for Hot stuffs!

Digg!

Espn

Cnn

Google Personal Page

Google Finance

 Seattle Times

Good stuff.

Crack for your developer brain

You need to be reading Coding Horror, Computer Zen, and Joel on Software.

Also, you need to read these following books immediatly.

Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices

The Best Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky

Coder to Developer

That is all for now.

Oh and check out eProject.com too, its pretty cool stuff.