Ask Me Questions, Help Me Be a Scientist

If you visit my site and ever pay attention to the side gutter, you may have noticed this.

I get a fair number of questions via various media: Twitter, Twitter DM, email, etc.  A lot of the answers to these questions wind up being blog posts or even series.  The Chess TDD series actually got started this way.

But something occurred to me recently.  I formed a hypothesis.  It’s probably only the most outgoing folks or those with whom I already have a relationship that will engage me in this way, meaning that a good chunk of the readership may want to ask questions but not have a comfortable venue for it.

As such, I’m drawing on the lessons of science classes growing up and running an experiment: I’m introducing this form.  It seems like a lower barrier entry way to submit a question, at least to me.  If I were reading a blog and wanted to ask the author a question, I might hesitate to email her since it’s not clear that she actually wants such questions.  But if she had a form on her blog saying, “ask me questions,” I wouldn’t feel any such reservations.

So, the experiment works if I wind up with more submissions to the form than I get email questions. Read More

The Phoenix of My New Site from the Ashes of my Battle with CSS

It wasn’t pretty.  There I stood, knuckles scraped raw, a black eye, and a nose that would probably never look quite the same way again.  But you should have seen the other guy.  I had emerged, victorious, my site finally behaving the way I wanted, and CSS lay quivering on the ground, a shattered mass of pound signs, periods, and curly brackets.  To use the word “literally” the way kids these days use it, that’s literally what happened earlier this evening.

You may have noticed some changes to my site if you’ve been visiting over the last few days (not the theme as much as content and layout).  Those are now more or less complete, pending any weird, little things that I notice.  There are a lot of changes, but none that should affect your consumption of DaedTech in any but a positive way.  Still, I encourage you to check out the site.

I slimmed down the menu options so that you can think of the site roughly this way, in order of menu items:

• The blog (which is now “Home”)
• Things I offer for free or pay (“Products“)
• Things I do, mainly for pay (“Services“)
• Things I recommend, or at least use (“Resources, since removed”)
• I explain myself (“About“)

And, that’s it.  No sub-menus or complex navigation.  I wanted to keep things simple.  Along those lines, I’ve cleaned out my site side gutter a good bit, moving all of the stuff about my books and Pluralsight courses to “Products.”  I have no idea whether this will affect sales or not, but these are the kind of things I’m getting interested in measuring, so I might soon install some kind of heat map.  Right now, I’ll just have to see if my sales dip.  But I like it better.  The old gutter felt like a switch statement that was expanding ominously and sorely in need of some polymorphism or something.

I’d like to speak to the resources page.  Over the last several years, I’ve gotten a lot of reader questions along the lines of, “what’s that thing with the dots in your Chess TDD videos” or “what tool do you recommend for text editing” or “what programming books should I buy?”  I usually just gave off the cuff answers, but now my answer is always going to be, “check out my resources page.”  I’ll add to it and modify it as time goes by.  Two important things about that page:

1. My level of endorsement for things there varies from “I use this and, meh, it’s something I use,” to “this is the best thing ever.”  Everything up there is something I have used or that I currently, actively use, but its inclusion there doesn’t necessarily mean I’d pitch it to you at a party over beers.
2. Where applicable, I used affiliate linking there, meaning that for some of those links, if you buy the product, I get a commission from the vendor.  Affiliate links have absolutely no impact on the price of the items you purchase or your experience at all.  Still, if it makes you uncomfortable, you can always navigate to the site not through my link.  I still recommend (or at least use) the stuff there.  I built the page first, by listing everything that would go up there, and then did a second pass to see if there were affiliate programs for the stuff I’d picked.

I’ll probably do a post on affiliate linking for tech bloggers at some point.  But, in the interim, if you have a site and want to monetize it even a little, I’d recommend reading up a bit (and feel free to email me with questions).  Compared to sponsor ads and product pop ups, it’s an extremely low key, non-invasive way to earn a little bit of revenue.  I offer this mainly because I sort of wish someone had explained some of these concepts to me years ago.

One final change that I’ll mention is that under Services and About, I’ve started talking about the increasing share of my living that comes from writing these days, and how I’ve started to stumble into this interesting business model of “tech evangelism as a service.”  I’m writing a lot and enjoying it, so I now have a list of clients I’ve worked with, doing consulting around tech blogging.  Under “About”, I have a list of other sites where you can see posts that I’ve made (look for some new additions to that coming soon, as well).

So, that’s it for the DaedTech service announcement.  I’ll get back to regularly scheduled posts next week, including some Chess TDD and one I’m working on about how to ‘win’ at meetings that I’m hoping you’ll enjoy.

Cheers!

Low Cost Legacy Help

If I think back a number of years, I can remember sitting in a software shop and feeling like the iconic stranger in a strange land.  I valued writing clean code, practicing TDD, refactoring away from procedural, legacy cruft, and generally improving my craft.  This was not otherwise common.  There were architects in that place that were long on seniority and opinions but short on chops, and they really, really liked them some global state.  And class size?  The bigger the better.

I seriously felt like I was in some kind of weird, parallel reality.  We’d have lunch & learns and watch things like Uncle Bob videos or talks from Channel 9 or whatever, and I would leave thinking that some kind of brainwashing A/B trick had resulted in me watching a different video from everyone else.  It was discouraging.  

I made progress in fits and starts.  I’d refactor a method here, kill a singleton there, inject an interface here, delete some dead code there.  But, then I’d go for a long weekend trip and come back to find a new singleton with more global state than its recently deceased cousin.  It was two steps forward and one step backward on a good week.  Like wading upstream against a raging, waist-high river, it was slow, exhausting progress.

I remember thinking that it’d be great if I could plead with one of the speakers in the video to come in and talk to people in this shop.  Maybe if one of the folks from the video was there, speaking live to them, something would finally get through.  Or maybe the video hero would take pity on me and offer me a job.  But I also knew that this was a pipe dream because hiring a consultant like this would be wildly expensive.

A lot of years have passed since then, and my life has evolved considerably.  I make most of my living doing coaching and helping improve software development craft.  Other parts of my living come from making videos and writing books about the same.  And through it all, I’ve never forgotten that feeling — a feeling with which, I’d imagine, many reading are familiar.

I’ve recently piloted with great success a new coaching model.  Think of the Chess TDD series, but imagine that instead of building a (non-trivial) toy application, I was doing a codecast in which I refactored some nasty legacy method in your code base to make it testable and narrated over it, explaining what I was doing and why.  The beauty of this approach is that we can pick some problems that are representative of your code base, and you can refer to the videos for context when doing refactorings from then forward.

This has proven to be a good option for small shops because it’s low touch.  It doesn’t require much if any synchrony, and, perhaps more importantly, it doesn’t require flights, hotels, a multi-day engagement fee with opportunity cost, or advanced schedule clearing.  It’s really just a matter of billable hours, which winds up being something like three hours per hour of video footage.  And five-ten hours of video footage is a surprisingly large, helpful amount.

Think of it this way.  It’s like someone recording a Pluralsight course wherein they refactor your code.  So if you’re reading this, and you think your code base and/or team could use a kick in the pants, feel free to reach out, even if it seems like a long shot.  There’s no charge for us to talk and even for me to sign an NDA and take a look at your code.  You can tell your boss or whomever that I really just kind of jump into problem solving mode and only start to think about billing arrangements once I’m convinced that I can contribute meaningful value to you.

Because, honestly, it’s also a lot of fun.  🙂