Big Dave’s Blog

It looks like Bletchley Park may be saved for a while. Several grants are in the works to keep what I consider the birthplace of serious computing alive for future generations to learn about. In July, about 100 UK academics signed a letter to The Times condemning the neglect of Bletchley. That seemed to have…

In a previous series on using workling and starling for asychronous processing, I described how to setup background tasks. Here is a quick way to use this for emails without a lot of changes to your application. First, create lib/asynch_mail.rb: # Makes an actionmailer class queue its emails into a workling queue # instead of…

The other day I reached in my pocket for my phone, and it was hot. It had gone from a full charge to dead battery in 2 hours. I wrote it off as an app gone nuts. When it happened again a couple days later, I started to investigate. After a lot of experiments, I…

Recently, I began taking the train into Boston. The train ride is about 50 minutes, so I have a decent amount of time to read, listen to music or podcasts. Sometimes, however, I wouldn’t mind watching one of my many purchased DVDs on the way.  Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to make this happen. Note, I…

BBC NEWS | Technology | ‘Neglect’ of Bletchley condemned I came across this interesting article regarding Blechley Park. I was surprised to see how rundown the place is. For those that don’t know, Bletchley Park is where the code breakers lived during WWII. It is basically the birthplace of modern computing, and it helped shortened…

I often ask the question “How can we properly work out pay for performance?” For some teams it sounds pretty simple. Sales, for instance, has some relatively simple metrics. How many encounters? How much did you sell? It’s a little more difficult for Engineering. Here’s an example that I often see: A great product team…

In a previous post about the F-117, I described some of the rules Kelly Johnson had for his projects. As promised, here is how I would map Kelly’s rules to agile development. Kelly: 1. The Skunk Works manager must be delegated practically complete control of his program in all aspects. He should report to a…