Today was a little different… Tasha got called to jury duty, so I got to work from home for the first half of the day (enjoying a little extra Eve time is always good!)  Luckily, she didn’t get selected and got to come home.  I always get a lot done when I’m working from home, however I had a few difficult LINQ problems that required me to talk through it with some coworkers.  I was happy to get to the office because there was much to do today.  I got a few bugs solved today, however I don’t have any idea how we’re going to get all of the necessary work accomplished in the allocated schedule.  These things always tend to come out in the wash, so we’ll see how the next few days go.

It was very rainy here in Colorado today, so that didn’t help to improve morale.  We have parts of the state with wildfires, parts with torrential rain, and parts with feet of snow.  Colorado is an interesting place.  Hopefully I’ll have some non-work related interesting stuff soon. *sigh*

Talk about jumping right into the fray today… I got to the office and we quickly realized that there was a big wrinkle in the code that we were working on, so the rest of the day quickly evaporated into debugging and looking for creative solutions to the problem.  Days like this slip by quickly, mostly due to the amount of concentration required to troubleshoot difficult technical problems.  That’s the good news.  The bad news is that they’re often stressful and tiring, so it was quite a relief to get home and find that Eve was being a good girl tonight and let me cuddle with her for awhile without screaming.

We’re now entering the Fussy Hours, she’s been up and down a few times but is now resting quietly on my lap.  Hopefully this trend continues!

Tonight was the last Jam Night at Walton Manor for awhile.  Paul and Kara are two weeks away from welcoming their own bundle of joy into the world, but that didn’t keep us from getting together and playing some music.  I was pleasantly surprised that Tasha wanted to come along, so the family piled into the CR-V and we headed over.  Tonight we played a little “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana and a few other songs… I enjoyed hearing the Les Paul through Paul’s Marshall half-stack.  So sweet.

Tomorrow we have a really busy day planned, so I’d best get to bed soon!

In my career, I have found that I have increasingly edged toward the need to people-please.  This becomes increasingly difficult as I fill a role that requires me to consider technical guidelines, hoping to enforce code quality.  With a job like that, you’re bound to ruffle feathers and have differences of opinion with others.  Even though it is possible to talk a tough game, if you’re like me you internalize little pieces of the hurt feelings and the strong emotion that comes with disagreement.  Over time, it becomes easy to let those dictate the way you interact with others.  I’ve become aware in the last few months how pervasive this is becoming with me.  This leads to a desire to build consensus for fear of upsetting others, failure to decide on something or take a strong stance, and general nervousness and weirdness.

I came across this article tonight, which deals very bluntly with precisely this problem and how to break this tenacious icy grip on one’s self-respect.  I have to say the content is very thought-provoking and I am adjusting to the idea that I don’t need everyone to like me at the office, I just need to do my job well and trust the opinion of those few valued individuals that matter to me.  (Tip: if you’re reading this blog, you’re probably one of them.)

I have met a few people in my career (I work with one now) that happily don’t care about asserting their opinions to those around him.  One of my previous superiors exhibited this behavior to an absolute art-form, and I respected him for that.  People either hated his guts or loved him, but he got results and I bet he sleeps pretty damned well at night.

So that’s what I’m striving for: getting comfortable about having my own opinion and not caring about what others think about it.

The first C# tool that I’ve been looking at is NCover, a very popular piece of software intended to do static code analysis and integrate with a build system.  NCover primarily focuses on calculating unit test coverage and cyclomatic complexity, two undeniably good metrics to drive test driven development and build maintainable code.  NCover has an analysis tool called NCover Explorer, which allows you to view the results of the test run, reports and visualizations on each execution, and trending when analyzing multiple test runs.

The Good

NCover is easy to set up and integrates as an external tool in Visual Studio, which makes kicking off the process of code analysis easy.  The Explorer allows some fairly flexible views of each code execution, which lines of code are not covered, and cyclomatic complexity at each method level.  This is also configurable so you can few complexity on each branch or symbol, but I’ve not messed with that much yet.  NCover allows you to exclude certain assemblies and provides roll-ups and reports of your coverage and what has changed in between runs.  I find this valuable in my daily work, and these reports also integrate with build systems (which I should get to play with relatively soon.)

The Bad

The structure of your unit test solutions matter.  We have a large codebase with a large set of unit tests, so it takes several minutes for the NCover report to run.  There is some strangeness with the External Tool configuration as well, it requires you to have your Unit Test project highlighted or else it can’t kick off the assembly correctly and errors. The way that trending is handled is clunky and not as useful in the Explorer as they would hope.  Our solution gets incremental improvements in each class, and the resolution of the graph on the NCover Explorer is not as helpful.  Also, the trend analysis counts failed runs as zero coverage which really makes the trending less useful if you accidentally fat finger the External Tool or don’t highlight the project properly.

The searching capabilities within the Explorer are clunky and take too long to execute, and the reports are a bit difficult to comprehend.  This could just be a limitation of my ability to interpret them though.  I don’t know if there’s a plug-in for Visual Studio to provide in-IDE highlighting of uncovered lines of code, I will have to look into this further.  It would be nice if this exists, since I know other tools provide this feature.

More on this soon, I suspect I will have more write once I try to integrate this with a build server and explore the features more closely.

Today was a good one at the office, I got caught up with some loose ends that have been trailing since last week.  This allowed me to participate in some discussions on code quality and how to enforce it in our organization, which is going to require me to research testing enforcement, code equality, and code coverage tools for C#.  I know of several good ones, and I’m finding out more and more about others as time goes on.  I might do a wrap-up of these tools once I’ve gotten a chance to play with them a little bit.

I really enjoy learning more about code quality and how it can be best applied to coding teams of our size.  This should make for some interesting research.  That’s all I’ve got for now, maybe some results will come along in the next week or two.

Last night I opted to go to sleep right after Eve’s last evening feeding, so I picked up an extra three hours of sleep before she needed more food at 3 am.  This extra three hours made a marked improvement to my productivity today at the office, and I didn’t even need my Red Bull to function like a human being!  That particularly thorny bug quickly fell by the wayside thanks to the extra firing neurons, and life is happy once again.

After work tonight, we were visited by members of our Church Evangelization Committee who wanted to talk to us because we were new to the Church and want to have Eve baptized there.  It was interesting to hear what they had to say, and they read some Bible passages before heading off on their way.  Having been raised Catholic, I’ve never had to be new to a Church where it was appropriate to meet people in this fashion and it was pretty strange.  I don’t generally like to discuss my faith with others because I don’t feel it’s any of their business, but it was interesting to hear their stories.

The rest of the evening was spent puttering around on the Internet, lamenting the recent American Idol results.  Tomorrow night we’re going to meet Paul and Kara at the Waterloo right after work, so it will be a full day!

Today was a strange day at work, I think that the lack of sleep is catching up with me.  I was having trouble getting through a particularly thorny bug, and after a long day of failed analysis I discovered that the problem was caused by bad data.  Argh.  I’m going to adjust my schedule so I get a little more sleep in hopes that this sharpens up my acuity a bit.

In other news, it’s time to start buying tickets for our summer concerts.  We’re cutting back so we don’t have to arrange as many sitters, but we’ve decided to make it worthwhile.  We just sprung for the VIP package for the Train/Maroon 5 concert, so we get to have a private meet and greet with the band.  We also get a hand-signed ukulele, VIP passes, prime tickets, the whole nine yards.  Normally this would be out of our budget, but we’re pooling our dates money between now and then in order to make it work.  Tasha and I are really excited!!

More soon!

Today was an interesting day at the office.  I knew that my day was going to get punctuated by Eve’s one-month check up, so I went to the office with the intent of having two productive segments of my day and it worked out very well.  I got a bug fixed before a meeting, fostered some good discussion (by being a strong-willed jerk, as is my role sometimes) during the meeting, and then it was time for Eve’s appointment.  Tasha and I were thrilled that Eve gained 7 oz in 9 days, which is much better than she was doing before.

After that, I got back to the office and helped troubleshoot a few bugs before getting another one 3/4 of the way fixed.  There was a particularly thorny section left before the second bug was complete, and I decided it was time to stop my efforts there so I didn’t make any mistakes.  I left a broken unit test to mark my spot so I can pick it up first thing in the morning.  Good times.

In lighter news, Summer concerts are starting to be scheduled here in Colorado.  We’re happy that Bell X1, Train and Maroon 5, Kings of Leon, and Death Cab for Cutie are all visiting again… we’ll probably count those as good excuses to have someone babysit Eve and get out of the house!

This morning I awoke at 5:00 am to get ready for Kangeiko, Day 2.  I was downstairs around 5:15 am, expecting my buddy Paul to pick me up around 5:20 am.  By the time 5:30 rolled around, I was wondering why he was running late.  I texted him, and about ten minutes later I called him to no reply.  I tried again ten minutes later.  He has been away from his phone before, so I didn’t want to just leave without him and head down there, and by 5:50 am I would’ve only gotten about 20 minutes of training by the time I arrived at the dojo anyway.  About 6:20 am, I got a phone call from him: he had overslept.  I am told he has double alarms and is sleeping with his phone near him tonight to ensure that we make it tomorrow and for the rest of the week.

Today was a long day at the office.  I had a slightly abbreviated day, taking an hour off so I could go to a doctor’s appointment with Tasha (everyone is fine!)  Once I was back to the office, I was able to slay a particularly problematic dragon which should put our user story to rest after weeks of furious effort.  Hopefully this marks a return to normalcy for me until the baby arrives.  That’s all for me right now!