OK, so I haven't done a lot here for a while, have I?
Well, I just posted a question I've been thinking about for a while over on Larkware (http://www.larkware.com), and I thought I might as well pop it here as well, so here you go...
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OK, so here's a question for you great and good who visit here. Before I ask it, if any of you happen to have a vested interest in the answer, I'm trusting you to put it aside for a moment... My team is not following most of the best practices we should be. I'm thinking about version control, unit testing, automatic documentation, help files, daily builds, ... I have just read (i) "Coder to Developer" and (ii) "The Pragmatic Programmer". Both books cover best practice, and recommend very similar practices (most of which I am very keen to start following). They do this with quite different styles and at different levels. Which book should I give to my team to read first?
Please don't feel limited to just those 2 books! tell me what you suggest. My team have varying levels of programming experience and aptitude, but they're smart guys, and I hope that they'll respond well to reasonned argument! What other books, courses, websites, articles, etc. can I use to educate them?
All polite suggestions welcome!
Thanks :)
- AJ
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Thursday, July 29, 2004
Yesterday (28th) was our anniversary.
We had the best yet (of 4). :0)
I took the day off and booked us in for lunch at Thackeray's. It's a top notch restaurant in Tunbridge Wells. Their lunchtime menu is basically the same as their evening menu, but the prices are much lower, and we'd often talked about going there. So I organised Amy to babysit for us. I didn't tell Sarah until the evening before. It was all v. fun. We wore our nice clothes and (oh luxury) took a cab both ways! :)
It was a sunny day, and we sat out in their courtyard bit. The food was fab. I mean absolutely amazing. The service was some of the best I've experienced (we were addressed as Monsigneur and Madamme). I have already inflicted detailsed descriptions of the meal itself on too many people, ... but I'm still going to repeat it here:
bread: hot from the kitchen, half a dozen different types of bread roll. We chose the dried apricot ones. As soon as I finished mine, the nice lady popped up and enquired as to whether I would like another. I declined (good call, as it turned out).
pre-starter: we were served an amuse bouche, a fish consomme. I am surely a pleb, but a meal where they bring you stuff you haven't even ordered: how posh is that?!
starter: I can't remember what Sarah had, but I went for the smoked eel. It was a pretty tiny amound of breaded smoked eel on top of a small tower of grated vegetables in some kind of dill sauce. The tastes were beautifully balanced, but - not having tasted eel before - I'm still not sure exactly what eel tastes like!
main course: Sarah had a salmon thing, about which she made positive noises. I chose the assiette of Kentish lamb - a wise choice, if M'sieur says so himself! There was liver, some joint meat (not sure which joint) and some bits I couldn't identify - but they tasted great :0) The meat was all cooked perfectly. I mean it fell apart, but all the tastes were there. Amazing.
They slipped up minorly in that they forgot Sarah's side salad, but they remedied that in about zero seconds, so who's complaining?
sorbet: Next, my lovely new ladyfriend appeared bearing orange sorbet. Again, the real taste was there, not just a sugary cold lump, which is how sorbet often turns out. I think part of the secret was that it was served above absolute zero, so the orange juice and the water hadn't separated out into distinct layers.
dessert: We were both tempted away from the "cheap" menu for dessert: Sarah had a banana tarte tatin, and I had the assiette de chocolat. I really must congratulate myself again on a simply impeccable descision. I recieved: a mini baked alaska with chocolate ice-cream, a mini chocolate souffle (!? how do they do that??) a shot glass filled with layers of different mousses and a slice of chocolate torte. Somehow I ended up with a glass of muscat to wash it down. Oh well.
coffee: So: coffee. "How can they turn a cup of coffee into an upmarket culinary experience?" I hear you ask. Well, they managed: coffee was duly delivered, accompanied by petits fours, brandy snaps and a pile of truffles the size of East Sussex. How I managed to get up the stairs, through the main restaurant and into the cab, I'll never know!
PS. Huge thanks to Amy for babysitting. She did well under difficult circumstances! :0)
why was this our best anniversary yet?
This was the first year when we haven't been cross with each other about something. In the last year, we've talked about and dealt with some things that had come betwen us. We've been really helped in this by the marriage course (http://www.htb.org.uk/marriage/), which was top. I think the most useful thing was that it gave us time with no distractions to simply talk about things we needed to talk about.
The most exciting thing about this being our best anniversary yet is that if this year we love each other better than we did last year, then it's possible that next year we'll love each other better still. - that sounds worth looking forward to, doesn't it?
We had the best yet (of 4). :0)
I took the day off and booked us in for lunch at Thackeray's. It's a top notch restaurant in Tunbridge Wells. Their lunchtime menu is basically the same as their evening menu, but the prices are much lower, and we'd often talked about going there. So I organised Amy to babysit for us. I didn't tell Sarah until the evening before. It was all v. fun. We wore our nice clothes and (oh luxury) took a cab both ways! :)
It was a sunny day, and we sat out in their courtyard bit. The food was fab. I mean absolutely amazing. The service was some of the best I've experienced (we were addressed as Monsigneur and Madamme). I have already inflicted detailsed descriptions of the meal itself on too many people, ... but I'm still going to repeat it here:
bread: hot from the kitchen, half a dozen different types of bread roll. We chose the dried apricot ones. As soon as I finished mine, the nice lady popped up and enquired as to whether I would like another. I declined (good call, as it turned out).
pre-starter: we were served an amuse bouche, a fish consomme. I am surely a pleb, but a meal where they bring you stuff you haven't even ordered: how posh is that?!
starter: I can't remember what Sarah had, but I went for the smoked eel. It was a pretty tiny amound of breaded smoked eel on top of a small tower of grated vegetables in some kind of dill sauce. The tastes were beautifully balanced, but - not having tasted eel before - I'm still not sure exactly what eel tastes like!
main course: Sarah had a salmon thing, about which she made positive noises. I chose the assiette of Kentish lamb - a wise choice, if M'sieur says so himself! There was liver, some joint meat (not sure which joint) and some bits I couldn't identify - but they tasted great :0) The meat was all cooked perfectly. I mean it fell apart, but all the tastes were there. Amazing.
They slipped up minorly in that they forgot Sarah's side salad, but they remedied that in about zero seconds, so who's complaining?
sorbet: Next, my lovely new ladyfriend appeared bearing orange sorbet. Again, the real taste was there, not just a sugary cold lump, which is how sorbet often turns out. I think part of the secret was that it was served above absolute zero, so the orange juice and the water hadn't separated out into distinct layers.
dessert: We were both tempted away from the "cheap" menu for dessert: Sarah had a banana tarte tatin, and I had the assiette de chocolat. I really must congratulate myself again on a simply impeccable descision. I recieved: a mini baked alaska with chocolate ice-cream, a mini chocolate souffle (!? how do they do that??) a shot glass filled with layers of different mousses and a slice of chocolate torte. Somehow I ended up with a glass of muscat to wash it down. Oh well.
coffee: So: coffee. "How can they turn a cup of coffee into an upmarket culinary experience?" I hear you ask. Well, they managed: coffee was duly delivered, accompanied by petits fours, brandy snaps and a pile of truffles the size of East Sussex. How I managed to get up the stairs, through the main restaurant and into the cab, I'll never know!
PS. Huge thanks to Amy for babysitting. She did well under difficult circumstances! :0)
why was this our best anniversary yet?
This was the first year when we haven't been cross with each other about something. In the last year, we've talked about and dealt with some things that had come betwen us. We've been really helped in this by the marriage course (http://www.htb.org.uk/marriage/), which was top. I think the most useful thing was that it gave us time with no distractions to simply talk about things we needed to talk about.
The most exciting thing about this being our best anniversary yet is that if this year we love each other better than we did last year, then it's possible that next year we'll love each other better still. - that sounds worth looking forward to, doesn't it?
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