More Dogs and Bears and Chickens and Things: Invite your colleagues to Pablo’s Fiesta

Posted on February 7, 2010 by Sharon Cichelli

If you work with developers who are women, please tell them about the Los Techies Open Space conference, coming up at the end of February. If you’ve attended an event like this in the past, you’re already aware of some … Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Interface-Oriented Design – Book Review

Posted on January 17, 2010 by Sharon Cichelli

Ken Pugh’s Interface-Oriented Design (Pragmatic Programmers) presents an approach to designing applications that focuses first on the interfaces, the places where pieces of the application interact. The interfaces here are not primarily user interfaces, but module-to-module interfaces and service interfaces, … Continue reading →

Posted in books | 1 Comment

Happy Hack-o-ween: Electronics and a microcontroller spice up the haunt

Posted on November 8, 2009 by Sharon Cichelli

Ah, Halloween, when a young woman’s fancy turns to love. And zombies. I had two personal requirements for the costume I would build this year: It shall be spooky. It shall blink. I’ll tell you about the final result, the … Continue reading →

Posted in arduino, electronics | Leave a comment

Refactoring Dinner: Interfaces instead of Inheritance

Posted on October 14, 2009 by Sharon Cichelli

Last time, in Cooking Up a Good Template Method, I had a template method cooking our dinner. An abstract base class defined the template—the high level steps for preparing a one-skillet dinner—and a derived class provided the implementation for those … Continue reading →

Posted in refactoring, unit testing | 2 Comments

Cooking Up a Good Template Method

Posted on August 29, 2009 by Sharon Cichelli

The software concept of “raising the level of abstraction” has improved my skill and creativity in cooking, by teaching me to think about recipe components in terms of their properties and functions. Practicing abstraction-raising in cooking feeds back to help … Continue reading →

Posted in Design Patterns | 9 Comments

Inconvenient Accessibility Makes Self-Documenting Code

Posted on June 20, 2009 by Sharon Cichelli

Intentional use of access modifiers (public, private, etc.) is like a clear memo to your team. This came up during Steve Bohlen‘s Virtual Alt.Net talk on domain-driven design. Steve explained the distinction between Entity objects, which have a unique identity … Continue reading →

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Why Argue About Words?

Posted on October 6, 2007 by Sharon Cichelli

From the opening session of Alt.Net 2007… Nearly as loud as the argument about changing the Alt.Net name is the camp saying “who cares what it’s named?” I don’t have a problem with the Alt.Net name, and I’m past bored … Continue reading →

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Why Scrum?

Posted on October 4, 2007 by Sharon Cichelli

Why not scrum? Until about January, our shop had been significantly process-encumbered. Where we could, those of us who cared implemented small strategies for improvement—preaching code readability, meticulous source control, building as if your code will still be in use … Continue reading →

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Blowing Off the Blog Dust

Posted on October 3, 2007 by Sharon Cichelli

Funny thing about using Scrum at work: there was suddenly a lot more work at work. Fun and consuming work. So I stepped out of the blogosphere and began to live in my IDE. Three changes bring me back: I’ve … Continue reading →

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