April 10, 2007
Jeremy has another fantastic post on his practices and philosophies. Another great read, no surprise. I wish I had tried to hire Jeremy when he was still in Austin...
April 9, 2007
Wired magazine has a very good article this month titled the See-Through CEO. Interestingly, two members of our technical team forwarded this article to me this morning. A few gems from the article: The new breed of naked executives also discover that once people are interested in you, they're interested in helping you out - by offering ideas, critiques, and extra brain cycles. Customers become working partners. Google is not a search engine. Google is a reputation-management system. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation. Putting out more evasion or PR puffery won't work, because people will either ignore it and not link to it - or worse, pick the spin apart and enshrine those criticisms high on your…
Scott Bellware is speaking tonight at the Austin .NET User Group on Domain-Driven Design with the ADO .NET Entity Framework Should be a good talk.
The Austin.NET User Group is sponsoring Austin Code Camp 2007 on May 5th. Last year's camp was excellent, and it's not too late to register for what's sure to be another great code camp. There are multiple sessions being led by Dovetail Software staff: Bret Pettichord from Dovetail Software Scripting Web Tests with Watir and Ruby - Learn how to write automated acceptance tests for web applications in this hands-on tutorial. We’ll show you how to use the Watir testing tool and the Ruby scripting language to create tests that drive Internet Explorer. By the end of the tutorial, you’ll have written several tests using an open-source tool popular with agile teams. Bring a Windows laptop with W2K, XP, or Vista. We'll provide the software. No knowledge of Watir or Ruby is assumed. (Level 200) Kevin Miller from Dovetail Software MonoRail Introduced…
March 30, 2007
I wrote a blog post a few months ago on our internal blog server (before we had external blogs): A lot has been written recently on the business value of transparency, and it's really struck a chord with me. I'm a big fan of Seth Godin, and it's a consistent theme in his blog and his books. Companies being transparent with their customers, prospects, and employees. Bloggers being transparent about their product reviews. Examples of the power of transparency, as well as the effects of being non-transparent, are everywhere. Dell publicly acknowledging their shortcomings, and openly discusses what they're doing to improve. Apple doing the exact opposite. Etc. I saw a new level of transparency today at Wesabe: Talk to Jason. Right there, on the front page on their website, in a very prominent position, is a phone number, email…
March 29, 2007
Dovetail Software is now hiring for the following positions: Clarify Developer Technical Support Engineer/Junior Developer Agile Software Developers Clarify Developer We're looking for talented, motivated individuals to contribute to the development of our existing Clarify-based applications. Experience with Clarify/Amdocs products is required, and experience with Dovetail/First Choice products is preferred. Web development experience is required, including ASP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Email us and tell us why you’d make a great addition to our team: tech-jobs@dovetailsoftware.com Technical Support/Junior Developer We're looking for individuals who are committed to wowing customers on a daily basis to be part of our technical support staff. Our support is one of our strengths as an organization, and a big part of our reputation. In addition to support responsibilities, you will have the opportunity to work with other members of our development staff to enhance our existing product…
March 27, 2007
I was working a support case today, and the customer closed his own case with the following remarks: *** CASE CLOSE 3/27/2007 12:03:27 PM websupport Problem has been resolved. User is an idiot <---written by user. I love it when people aren't afraid to admit they made a mistake and poke a little fun at themselves. Certainly made me laugh!
March 26, 2007
I was recently on an initial phone screen with a candidate for a developer position here at Dovetail, and towards the end of our conversation, I asked him if he had any questions. After a few standard ones, he asked me about our web development standards, especially in the area of HTML standards, use of CSS, etc. I answered, especially gearing my answer towards how we approach these topics in the current web application project that we're working on, and explaining how we've worked especially hard over the last year or so at improving our development methodologies and work product. He noted that my answer didn't jibe with the code on the dovetailsoftware.com website. He noted that the site makes heavy use of tables (for non-tabular data), lots of embedded styles (as opposed to CSS), bad class naming (class="table3", class="style15"),…
March 23, 2007
Once again, Hugh MacLeod's hits another one out of the park with a cartoon drawn on the back of a business card. Hugh: Blogging is not about creating yet another sales channel. If you don't read Hugh's blog yet - what are you waiting for? Just subscribe already.
One of our users came to me this week with a request to expand the size of the contact's job title field. Apparently people now have ridiculously long titles such as Assistant to the Regional Director of Synergistic Business Alliances, Northwest Montana Region. Using a simple SchemaScript and the Dovetail SchemaEditor, this change is trivial. Here's my complete script: <schemaScript xmlns="http://www.dovetailsoftware.com/2006/10/SchemaScript.xsd"> <updateColumn table="contact" name="title"> <length>100</length> </updateColumn></schemaScript> Because I have an XSD that defines what schema scripts should look like, and I used Visual Studio to create my script, I know that my script is valid before actually running it with SchemaEditor. It for some reason I had a typo or I didn't close a tag, VS would visually let me know.With my script in place, I simply run SchemaEditor to apply the changes: schemaeditor.exe -apply Output Report: Dovetail SchemaEditor Difference…
