The Snowman by Jo Nesbø
4/5
Very good, enjoying the entire Harry Hole series. Wishing for translations of the first two now!
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Book Reviews, catfood, shapefile, C#, Tools, Links, Rant, shapefile, snowman, pseudoephedrine, redbreast, stephenson, history, appeals, microsoft, management, character, embrace, running, leopard, palahniuk, #Bernal, #todo, #tools, #fb, #API
I've just released a small update to my C# Shapefile library on Codeplex. Catfood.Shapefile 1.50 fixes a couple of bugs related to metadata and adds the ability to access metadata records directly via IDataRecord.
Microsoft has released Visual Studio Achievements, an extension that brings gamification to Visual Studio in the form of badges. The achievements are a mix that include feature discovery, best/worst practices, printing source code and swearing.
Initially I wrote this off as a silly little feature. But it could be the start of a whole new development methodology religion that I'm going to call Badge Driven Development (BDD).
It's related to Test Driven Development, but instead of writing unit tests first you start with creating a set of achievements. These should be a measurable mix of business goals, personal development, coding standards and random mayhem. Once you have measurable badges you can start writing code and build a leaderboard for teams and individuals.
BDD has all the ascetic one-upmanship of TDD, and owes something to EDD as well. It's the Parkour of Agile. I should start a training business where you can become a certified Badge Driven Scrum Master.
I love it when making some noise works. The NPS is pushing its dog management plan back a year to incorporate the feedback from the current draft. A couple of encouraging considerations mentioned in the most recent newsletter are:
Evaluating additional access for dog walking, both on leash and under voice control.
Revising the compliance based management strategy by including natural and cultural resource monitoring, removing automatic triggers and restrictions, and incorporating additional education and enforcement.
So at the very least this looks like they’re walking back the “poison pill” provision that would allow the NPS to change the rules without further consultation. Won’t know how good or bad the changes are until the new DEIS is published later this year but at least the NPS is listening.