Every team needs a Brad Abrams

For those of you who don’t know, Brad Abrams is one of the guys behind the largely consistent .NET Framework – in particular Brad looks at things like naming conventions of classes that are part of the .NET Framework and convinces disparate teams produce something that looks like it was made with the one pair of hands.

Consistency is key in any software development project and I think its important to have someone who is goaled with making that happen. Using tools like FxCop is a great start – but in the end you need someone who is responsible for making sure that the code-base is asthetically consistent.

Thats easy to do on a small team, especially when there is an obvious team leader – but as teams get larger it becomes less and less obvious who has the final say over these things. Who is the Brad Abrams on your team? Have you ever allowed them to force significant redevelopment of the code base in the name of consistency and maintainability?

AutoLinking and Technologies that Change Content

Its certainly an interesting discussion. Should a feature such as AutoLinking be acceptable where it takes the content that someone wrote and modifies it before presentation to the end-consumer – often in subtle and non-obvious ways.

The discussion is interesting because I fall into both categories – publisher and reader. As a publisher I would like to think that my content got to the reader as I intended without the fundamental structure being altered (links are fundamental to the structure of the web). Typically there isn’t any commercial imperative there – just an artistic whim.

As a reader tools that allow me to get more information are incredibly useful, it’d be great to be able to click on a link and have my user agent suggest some alternative content – although I wouldn’t necessarily want it to obscure the underlying link (I’m thinking some kinda of async data mining panel off to the side).

Where do you sit? Have you considered both sides?

The Red Couch- Chapter 1

I know its old news – I am catching up on a two week backlog of blog entries. I really enjoyed it, it helped enumerate a number of the things I feel about blogging.