NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 12 Results and Week 13 Picks

posted on 11/26/08 at 10:43:03 pm by Joel Ross

Yet another week goes by with no technical content. But at least I have my picks!

Results Summary

There's very little better than Thanksgiving day football. Of course, it always includes the Lions, so there is a downside

Check back next week for results and more picks. And happy Thanksgiving!

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Category: Football

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 11 Results and Week 12 Picks

posted on 11/20/08 at 08:05:23 pm by Joel Ross

Another week of being just about too busy, but I had to get my picks up, right?

Results Summary

On to this week's picks.

Check back next week for results and more picks.

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 10 Results and Week 11 Picks

posted on 11/13/08 at 08:07:23 pm by Joel Ross

I almost forgot to get these posted before the game tonight. Getting up and running in a new job is always a time consuming proposition, but I'm getting there!

Anyway, here's last week's results. I did pretty good - except over/under, where I was horrible!

Results Summary

And right into this week's picks.

Check back next week, where maybe I'll get the picks up at a decent time.

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Category: Football

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 9 Results and Week 10 Picks

posted on 11/05/08 at 10:46:58 pm by Joel Ross

Well, no work this week, but somehow it's been busier than just about any week this year! It's sad when you look forward to getting back to work so you can stop working so much!

Anyway, I had a pretty good week last week, and it made me above 50% for all three categories - picks, spread picks and over/under. Not bad.

Results Summary

On to the reason this is being posted on Wednesday instead of Thursday - a Thursday night game!

Check back next week for results and more picks.

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 8 Results and Week 9 Picks

posted on 10/30/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross

This week has been just as busy as last week, so another quick hit. But it was a rather decent week. If I'd put money on every game (picking, spread and over/under), I would have had over a 7% return in one week. That's pretty good.

Results Summary

Here's my picks for this weekend.

Check back next week for results and more picks!

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Transitions

posted on 10/28/08 at 11:16:05 pm by Joel Ross

About a month ago, I came across a post from Joey Beninghove that caught my attention. Actually, it was a tweet of his referencing his blog post. Anyway, it was about a job opening where he works, and what caught my eye was that it was a telecommuting position. As some of you may know, I enjoy working in the The Dungeon when I can, and the opportunity to make it permanent was very appealing to me. So I decided to contact him to get some more information, and ultimately decided to apply.

Fast forward a month. Last Friday, I accepted an offer from TrackAbout, and will start there on November 10th. This week, I turned in my notice at RCM. I'm extremely excited about the opportunity. Ironically, I could copy the changes Joey posted about when he started at TrackAbout and use them as my own. This is a pure software development job - no more consulting for me, which is a scary prospect. All I've done throughout my career is consulting, so it's a big change for me. But I've felt the tug to "settle down" and get deeper into the code, and learn what it means to write maintainable code. Now I'll get that chance.

I will definitely miss the time I've spent at Sagestone/NuSoft/RCM. I've been there for over 6 years, and learned just about everything I know about software development while I was there. I've had a chance to help change the way software is developed there, and I've worked on a few very cool projects. Me leaving has more to do with what TrackAbout offers than it does with what RCM lacks. I'll definitely miss working with the people at RCM, but the good news is that it's easy to stay in touch with them through Twitter, Facebook, etc. so I'm not really worried about losing touch. Still, it's not the same as working with them every day.

Anyway, I'm very excited to get started, and looking forward to working at home. Plus, how many people can say they found their job on Twitter?

Category: Personal, RCM Technologies, TrackAbout, Inc

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Recognizing and Eliminating Your Mistakes

posted on 10/27/08 at 12:12:10 am by Joel Ross

As I stated in my last post, I've been reading up a bit on code reviews. I didn't touch on the last part of the book, which finishes with a discussion of Capability Maturity Model Integration, Team Software Process and Personal Software Process.

When I was at Crowe, I was a part of the review process to move from CMM level 1 to CMM level 2. For the most part, the ideas were good, but the implementation seemed overly documentation-intensive. Not that documentation is necessarily a bad thing, but there was so much administration that I didn't see how it could work and still allow us to be competitive.

Anyway, the part of the discussion that caught my attention was the idea of using a personal checklist, much like the checklist you'd use to perform a code review. In order for you to become a better developer, you need to know where you make mistakes. I could sit here and write out all of the ways I think I screw up, but that's just my gut speaking. It's not rooted in fact. The book's recommendation is that you should keep track of all of the mistakes you  make and categorize them. By making yourself aware of the types of mistakes you commonly make, you'll start to avoid making them, and then you can take that off your list. And until you fix that type of issue, you'll at least be aware of it, so as you review your own code, you can look for it.

I think I'll start trying to do this - just a very quick and dirty list, and at the end of the day, I'll categorize them. By making them visible, hopefully I'll start thinking about them as I write code. At the very least, it'll give me something to look at as I review my own code before I check it in.

Of course, that's another benefit of keeping a personal checklist - if you're doing code reviews, you can (and should) share that with your reviewers, because it gives them something to focus on - specific types of mistakes that you know you commonly make. Remember, it's not a bad thing for your team to know your weaknesses. Ultimately, you share the same goal - build the highest quality software possible. It's in the best interest of the whole team to help each other improve, and the best way to do that is to know where you need to improve. And in the mean time, it's good to have someone else looking over your shoulder.

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Category: Development

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Code Reviews

posted on 10/24/08 at 12:27:43 am by Joel Ross

I've been reading through a free book I got a while back - Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review - and it's actually a pretty good read. It is a rather dry read, but there's some good information in there. And in case you were wondering, you can get the book for free as well. Just follow the above link.

Anyway, I should note that there's definitely a reason the book is free - it's findings and advice directly correlate with the feature set of their core product - Code Collaborator. Conveniently, there's also a 20-page ad for the software in the book. The software is around $500 per seat, so you can see why it's worth giving away the book. The advice in the book is definitely slanted toward what their own tool does. The question is whether the software was built around the results of the research (of which the book has plenty), or if the research was hand picked to support what their software does. I don't know that answer, but regardless, there's some interesting information in the book - and since it's free, I think it's worth the read.

There are definitely some things I question in the book - for example, it essentially assumes that everyone is doing code reviews and is reviewing every single line of code. That's not something I've ever seen. Regardless of some of those type of issues, there are a few takeaways that I'd love to get a chance to use on my own projects.

To be honest, I haven't been a part of that many code reviews on my projects. When I was at Crowe, we did code reviews on an internal product I was a part of. We didn't review every line - not even close. We reviewed code for key pieces of the system, as well as reviews for new developers. Crowe typically hires (or at least used to hire) a lot of fresh developers - people right out of college - so reviewing their code was important to make sure they were progressing and doing things the way the project expected. At that time, a lot of that was my code. Crowe was my first job out of college. Since we were all relatively inexperienced, we didn't really know much about what we were supposed to be doing. It was more of a walkthrough of the structure of the code rather than a true analysis looking for specific types of issues. Looking back, I don't remember finding many defects in the code, and the ones we did find were more along the lines of code flow and coding standards rather than actual bugs. Still important, but if I had it to do over, I think it would be much more productive.

We've done code reviews on a few of my projects at Sagestone/NuSoft. Based on how we did them, I don't think they were all that productive either, because we didn't have a solid goal for why we were doing reviews. We needed to do a review, so we did one. If I had to pick a goal, it was more to ensure that the code lived up to coding standards, rather than reviewing the code for correctness. It's important to be consistent, but there are easier, less time intensive methods to verify that. Our time would have been better spent looking at the actual logic contained in the code rather than the structure of the code. But hindsight is 20/20, right?

Anyway, there's a few things the book highlights that I found interesting.

That's definitely a shift in how I've done code reviews in the past. For the most part, the prep for the code review itself only consisted of a brief review of the code, and the assumption was that the deep dive into the code would happen in the two hour meeting. It actually makes sense that it should be the opposite - the deep dive should happen ahead of time, and the meeting (if it even needs to happen) should just be a summary of what was already found.

Interesting thoughts, really. But I still wonder how many people are actually doing code reviews. So, are you doing code reviews? Are they effective? What makes them that way?

Category: Development

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 7 Results and Week 8 Picks

posted on 10/23/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross

It's been a busy week (again), but here's last week's results.

Results Summary

On to this week's picks.

Check back next week for more results and more picks.

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Category: Football

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NFL Picks: 08-09 Week 6 Results and Week 7 Picks

posted on 10/16/08 at 08:00:00 pm by Joel Ross

I'm sitting in a hotel room in Orlando, but I still wanted to get these out there. So here they are! Results from last week:

Results Summary

And on to picks for this week:

Check back next week for more results and more picks

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