Things I never want to give up.

As we get towards the end of the year people are starting to evaluate the personal and professional lives and pull together action plans for the future. Part of this process is understanding what is good and worth keeping (its kind of depressing if you just focus on the negatives all the time).

Andrew Parsons has posted up some of his observations about a recent experience at work where a team of our guys were deploying the new version of the Readify web-site and how the tools of a virtual organisation were really exploited.

When I am out in the field I usually spend a bit of time explaining to customers about how Readify makes use of the various tools at our disposal and they are surprised at how much “stuff” we get without even really having to ask for it. I tend to explain this away as the company recognising the value of employees that are enabled with the right tools and relying on us to use them wisely.

The things that keep me at Readify are:

• Our internal “technical” mailing list; this is the heartbeat of the company. Not only is it the place that you can access the collective intelligence of the organisation, but it is also where you can have a bit of fun.
• Trust in me; this is a big one. A lot of employees at other companies seem to start out there with the premise that they aren’t trusted. I don’t feel like that at Readify, I feel that I am trusted implicitly.
• The culture; this is certainly an important one. Part of it is enabled by the technical mailing list, but the other part of it is the ability to reach anyone in the organisation and have a very blunt conversation about issues and then watch as appropriate resources are used to correct any issues.

These are the things that I never want to give up.

Q

Recently our CEO, Graeme Strange posted up on his blog about the secret recipe for building a successful virtual business. Darren followed up the post with some more detail about how we approach software development at Readify, with a focus on our internal tooling.

One of the challenges that I personally have is figuring out how to productively use my allocation of Professional Development time. I’m not much of a book learner in that if I am going to sit down and figure out how to do something I really need to be in front of the compiler, and generally speaking, I want anything I produce to be useful.

Last year I came up with this idea whilst on a client engagement of creating a Team Project inside TFS called “Q”, named after Q branch in the James Bond universe. This year I transplanted this concept into my internal work at Readify and I’ve had some success building simple little tools, some for PD, and some for fun that benefit Readify.

These tools are:

• Q1 - a build server virtualization tool for TFS.
• Q2 - a batch program that e-mails out a list of consultant locations daily.
• Q3 - a reliable continuous integration engine for TFS.
• Q3 - a reliable dependency replication engine for TFS.
• Q5 - a set of web-services that can be used to manage TFS security.
• Q6 - a hack that allows Team Build 2005 to trigger Visual Studio 2008 builds.
• Q7 - a tool for requesting development servers.
• Q8 - a tool for encouraging the sales team to improve address data in CRM.
• Q9 - a tool for overriding bad address resolutions with lat/long information.
• Q10 - a tool for splitting PDF payment summaries and forwarding them.
• Q11 - a tool for replicating file sharing support in TFS.

Each of these projects are at various stages of completeness, but in general the ones with the real business drivers are complete. The only ones that I feel I haven’t really finished with are Q7 and Q9.

One of the interesting things that the Q projects free me from is my own procrastination around choosing names for the things I write. I often found that in the past I would spend a day thinking of a really cool name for a tool that would only take me half a day to actually code. Interesting huh?

Anyway - I recommend that you start a Q project inside your organisation and allow people to contribute their time to it based on where they see the immediate needs of the business. I actually have a task list in Outlook full of pet projects that I want to do and as I find the time I’ll probably churn through them and they’ll get their own Q designation.

P.S. I will soon be releasing Q1, Q3, Q4 and Q11. I’m thinking that I might put them up onto CodePlex and let them developer a life of their own. If you love something set it free

"Get Latest" in Team Foundation Server

For those of you who have been using Team Foundation Server for a while are probably aware, Get Latest in TFS doesn’t necessarily mean the same thing that Get Latest in Visual SourceSafe means. This lead to some confusion in teams that were migrating from the later to the former.

Richard Banks has written up a great little overview of the issue in a way that developers moving from VSS can easily understand. From now on I’m going to link to that post instead of trying to explain it on a whiteboard. Well done Richard!