Shine On !

Prologue: Never in a million years did I think I was going to enjoy teaching/coaching of any kind until a few years ago. My younger son was in third grade and trying out for the travel basketball team in our town that was know to have  a very strong basketball following. We were there on time and as the tryouts proceeded, I sat by the bleachers, cringing as he under performed. The kid was neither fast nor accurate. After a grueling two hours, we knew he was not going to be picked. Prior to this, I'd thought he was going to do well. He had a passion for the game and would shoot hoops every spare moment he had. That was not enough for today's competition. He could have used an adult to have trained him. A personal coach. He needed to be taught the fundamentals of the game and ball handling. Since his father was not around to do this, I decided I had to play a bigger part in making it happen. The boy loved the game and I wanted to make sure he had all the help he could get to

As part of Bob Allen's Code Craftman Saturdays , we had Shanti Suresh present a hands on workshop at Pillar Technology's Forge 4.0 location in Ann Arbor . Her class shed some light onto what cool computer hackers mean when they say they are going to hack into a system. Bob Allen and Shanti Suresh For this workshop,  which ran 5 keyboard hours we started with an introduction to the different terms such as Phase 1 : Introduction to security  Shanti spoke about when and why security became an important aspect of application development and gave a brief overview of the following. Security Authentication Authorization Next we got down and dirty. Phase 2 : Setting up with Zap Using primarily two tools, WebGoat 6.0.1   and Zap  ( beware of using Zap... it makes your computer vulnerable when connected to an external network or internet) we were able to do some sql injection and bypass security. We setup Zap to intercept traffic both to and from the

Basically I followed instructions on this p age  Setting Up Your Own Cyber Dojo using Turnkey First get the 14.0-jessie-amd64-vmdk image from here . Extract the vmdk image from step 1.  Also download Docker and follow the instructions to install Docker Toolbox  http://docs.docker.com/mac/step_one/ Step 2 will provide us with a VirtualBox. Setup a new linux box with the vmdk image In Virtual Box click on new and select Linux for Type and Debian(64 bit) for Version Click Continue Then choose the memory size. I left it at default Click Continue Select use an existing hard drive and select your image This will create a linux box and ask for you to select a password. Confirm password Use Docker to startup the virtual box you configured Start your service with $ service apache2 restart

A short blurb about the way my current project is being run. It's the first time I've been on a very agile project and this kicked off two weeks ago. Sprint Zero had the following elements to it. Team composition was a tech lead, a pair of craftsmen, a product owner. Project kicked off with a Sprint Zero planning meeting that ran a couple hours with everyone available. We mapped out the domain and language used in the domain. Trello was used to create a Sprint Zero board with all members added to it. Members added spike cards and the tech lead ordered them by priority. Github was used to save all the spiked work under one repository. Github also served as the location for our wiki that hosted our play books and domain discovery. A definition of done was written out and stored on the wiki Code is pushed to Github (see GitFlow notes) TDD SOLID and DRY Code Base Code is formatted Static Analysis executed CI Server Build + Test is running Green Branch is merged

This article is my effort to bring the founder perspective to a lean team. Most programmers I know would love to work on a lean startup they are passionate about. Getting the product out to the customer faster, building tools to test the outcome, delivering value to the customer in small increments as we continue to gauge the response. These practices provide less uncertainty on whether or not the product is successful. While we sometimes have to  abandon an experiment because of market failure, there is no waste. By contrast, delivering software for a startup founder so that we may raise venture capital is more complex. Prior to having that customer feedback, the team has to come up with creative ways to anticipate what should be the MVP that would deliver the most value to the founder. Building lean software is all about reducing waste, and programmers involved in lean software are conscious of this at all times. The hardest part for such founder-based teams is to ite

Recently I got into building cross platform mobile device apps using Xamarin Forms. A project I was working with required that we add components in both IOS and Android. When you add a component to your project -> Project Name -> Folder called components Then Xamarin provides samples that go with these components. Double clicking on the component name would bring up a page such as this... Tab over to Samples Double click on Open Sample: This opens up the sample as a project and helps with figuring out the details. It's pretty NEAT!