silk and spinach

Wordle seems to be cropping up in a lot of blogs right now, so I thought I’d give it a try on my delicious bookmarks:

I think that sums up my interests quite well. But then, I guess that’s inevitable…

One reason I started this blog is that my left and right brains don’t seem to be connected to each other: I tend not to know what I think until I hear myself stating an opinion, and then I’m often horrified by what I hear. So blogging is a bit like talking to myself. Steven Pinker (I think) even suggests this — talking to oneself, not blogging — is the most plausible reason for the evolution of speech. Anyroadup, I haven’t been doing enough of either during the last few months, and I’m feeling the effects.

However, I have recently discovered the fun of asking and answering questions on LinkedIn, and I’m finding it has much the same effect as talking to myself. So when I answer a question over there, and in so doing discover I have an opinion I like, I’ll share it here too. Here’s the first one…

Andrew Calvert asked: “What is your experience of mentoring programmes? Mentoring; some think is an organic process that cannot be artificially replicated. Others think that you can assign mentors to learning partners (or mentees!) put in enough structure and have a working mentor programme. What do YOU think? Experiences?”

My answer:

I believe mentoring involves a) being a role model, and b) partnering to share knowledge. Institutional mentoring programmes (such as buddy systems for new joiners) can be great initially, but in my experience only pass on basic information. On the other hand, role modelling — and the kind of mentoring that goes along with it — has longer lasting and more positive effects.

In my work in software development I always try to involve both aspects. And I find that mentees (sic) self-select once they’ve seen that I’m working in a way that gets results. So when a developer asks for my help, he’s usually already seen how I work; I can therefore help him solve his problem in the same way.

So yes, I think mentoring is “organic” and should not be forced upon people. But organic growth always starts with a seed, and I believe that seed is the presence of role models who are willing to help and share.

Do you have experience of role modelling or mentoring programmes? Which works (best)?

Brian Marick emailed me to ask whether the Carnival has an RSS feed. The simple answer is ‘no’, but there are several services around that will allow you to subscribe to a search for Carnival of the Agilists articles - Technorati or Google, for example. In fact, either of these is likely to be more foolproof than relying on us to always remember to tag our carnival posts correctly.

It turns out that this blog is three years old today! That realisation took me by surprise this week, as it doesn’t seem all that long ago that I began. Many thanks to those few readers who’ve stayed the course all that time, and thanks also to the many new readers who’ve come here since then. And my apologies for the regular downtime in the early days, and for the recent move (which has broken all your links to specific posts).

Many of my earliest posts have remained popular throughout - and indeed the stats show there’s been a lot of interest in avoid boolean parameters and if… just recently - both written in July of 2004. Those two, together with the product owner must pull (revisited), have consistently been the most frequently read posts on this blog.

Back then in June 2004 it seems I was also practising yoga regularly. We lost the time for that when baby James came along, and I’ve just realised that he was conceived the same week as I began this blog. Quite possibly my most productive week ever…

The silkandspinach.net domain now points to this version of the blog, and so the blog’s move to wordpress is now complete. If you’ve arrived here by following a link that pointed to a page in the old blog, all those links are now broken - my apologies. (The move was necessary because I became increasingly dissatisfied with my old hosting service, with MovableType, and with hosting the blog myself.) The RSS feed is unchanged, so if you never actually visit these pages you’ll (probably) have noticed nothing.

Well I’ve taken the plunge and begun moving my blog over to the hosted service at wordpress. Still lots to do, including: moving all the images and other files; fixing all the internal links between blog posts; sorting out the CSS; etc. But all the old posts are here, and I’m hoping that the Feedburner feed is pointing correctly here too.

Feels weird. I guess time will tell…

My apologies to you if you’ve tried to access this blog recently and just given up waiting. The hosting service I use for has been getting slower and slower recently. I mean really slow. Yesterday, it took me nearly four hours to put the finishing touches to the carnival - changes that consisted of only twenty words or so. Because each save, and each preview, either took an age or never completed at all. (Apparently the new hardware to “fix” the problem has been incorrectly commissioned, and it won’t be up and running for several more weeks. In the meantime I have a service that is sometimes just unusable.)

Of course I could use an offline editing tool such as BlogJet or Ecto; but I’m becoming fed up with Movable Type too. And yesterday Movable Type helped me screw up. I had begun drafting the carnival on Monday - that is, in April. And when I finally hit ‘publish’ yesterday afternoon, I forgot to change the authored-on date, which meant the post looked like it was published Monday too. I noticed the mistake and quickly fixed it, but by then Movable Type had saved a version under the April archive. So now there are two different HTML pages containing the carnival, and my stats show they are receiving roughly equal numbers of visits. Bummer.

So I’ve decided to move. My hosting service is unreliable and often unusable, and my blogging tool is more work than I need.

I could simply move the blog - and Movable Type - to my other server, which seems very reliable, and over which I have greater control. That would mean all those links into this blog wouldn’t get broken. Which would be nice, because I’ve spent a lot of time and effort getting my googlerank up to 6.

On the other hand, the thought of spending more time as an admin, nursing a fragile set of Perl scripts, is not a happy one. I want something that’s pain-free and less effort than Movable Type. What do you recommend? Which are the best free hosted blog services currently available?

When I’ve made the switch (that word makes it sound kinda easy and instantaneous, doesn’t it) I plan to keep the silkandspinach.net URL and the feedburner feed. But the Atom feed will go - so if you’re currently subscribed to that feed, please switch now.

Thanks for your patience, and your help.

Update
Movable Type has just told me that this is my 400th blog post, which seems to me to be an auspicious time to move on. (Doubly so, in fact, because I know this blog contains only 355 posts!)

I feel as if I’ve been away from here for quite some time! I’m back now, although I won’t be posting quite as often as I used to. I’ll be covering the same general software development topics as previously, but I hope with more emphasis on my working practice - particularly “what works for me” and “things I’d like your help with”. Thanks for reading, and thanks for your comments.

Yet again I’ve given this blog a facelift - I hope you like it!

The main substantive change is that I’ve moved away from Movable Type’s category system. Instead, I’ve tagged each post, and I’m using del.icio.us to organise those tags. So clicking on a tag link will take you to a del.icio.us page that lists all of the other posts in this blog that I’ve tagged with the same keyword. It saves me a lot of rebuild time, and it makes it easy for you to find related pages elsewhere in the web. Etc. Call it delegation.

Today being the first of the month, I decided to take a look back at what I was blogging about last February:

A couple of the posts (notably keep the task board visible at all times) seem to have acquired a life of their own in the intervening months. But the post that stands out from this future vantage point is what is “quality”?. Since I wrote that piece I’ve discovered Tom Gilb’s work and studied it in depth. He’s built an entire agile method around the concept of testable qualities - one that I would love to try, even on a toy project. I am beguiled by the notion that requirements and user stories are solutions to quality problems. Nice to see that my thinking is consistent across a period as long as a year!

And how I managed to post on the last day of that particular month is beyond me…