Under the hood and working with .Net, TDD, Software Design, and Agile Stuff
Last time I was negative and sarcastic, so this time I want to be positive. My best days as a coder were:
- When I used to write Shadow IT apps for my engineering team, anytime I wrote something that eliminated a lot of grunt work was a very happy day.
- I got stuck as a noncoding architect in possibly the worst IT shop in the country, but the biggest joy ever was the day they released the new "Responsibility Matrix" and my team realized that our "System Architect" role was not responsible for one single intermediate deliverable. That's right, zero responsibility.
- The day that I first "got" ReSharper
- The day the ReSharper 4.0 finally became stable
- The day that I first "got" jQuery
- The day that my first big system went live -- and worked on the first big transaction.
- The iteration when a previously troubled project suddenly righted itself and the coding became easy
- The day I toured a factory and saw my software running at all the receiving doors
- The day Chad & I decided to quit our previous job
- The day last month when our new rules engine & rules DSL ran flawlessly for the first time after a 6 week coding sprint
- The time my friend got an award from the business users in appreciation for the new application we built together.
- Any single day I get a complement on StructureMap or somebody writes me to say my blog helped them with something
- My first ThoughtWorks away day. If you want to learn to be a good developer, the easiest way to get there is to interact with good developers.
About Jeremy D. Miller
Jeremy began his IT career writing "Shadow IT" applications to automate his engineering documentation, then wandered into software development because it looked like more fun. Jeremy previously worked as a systems architect building mission critical supply chain software for a Fortune 100 company and learned agile development practices as a .Net consultant at ThoughtWorks, one of the pioneers of agile development. Jeremy is the author of the open source StructureMap (http://structuremap.sourceforge.net) tool for Dependency Injection with .Net and the forthcoming StoryTeller (http://storyteller.tigris.org) tool for supercharged FIT testing in .Net. Jeremy's thoughts on just about everything software related can be found on his weblog "The Shade Tree Developer" at http://codebetter.com/blogs/jeremy.miller, part of the popular CodeBetter site. Jeremy is a Microsoft MVP for C#.
