I’ve been so busy with my current client that I haven’t had the time needed to do a couple topics I wanted to talk about any justice, so they remain in the queue. But, the work load hasn’t deterred my project manager (Chip) from starting a blog over on GeeksWithBlogs. I’m not sure if that is a sign that as a PM, he is immune from the workload, or that he has got the blogging bug really bad (OK, that’s a cheap shot a PMs. I know that they work hard, but I like to tease Chip, and try to keep him from going to the dark side (he is a coder at heart first, and PM second)).
One of the really cool things (OK, one of the things that I really enjoy) about the type of consulting I do is the whole mentoring aspect. I don’t just try to write the code for the client, I try to develop the skills of the people on the project. Some people fight it, but most are tired of continuously writing apps in the same RAD fashion that they have been doing their whole career, and actually enjoy trying to rethink the way they write code. When I come in and tell them that what they have been doing their whole career has probably been wrong, and that there are much better (and easier) ways to do things, I know that I’ll hit some resistance, but eventually they will start to see what I’m talking about, and drink the cool-aid (and hopefully move onto other projects, and spread the disease). Up until recently, I’ve only had success teaching the art of Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, XML, and multi-tiered architecture by working with people on projects (one on one mentoring). But, at the last Boston Code Camp, I noticed that my presentations are slowly developing into another avenue of enlightenment, which was very encouraging. My goal is to continue trying to developing my presentation skills down that path (and I hate to call what we do at Code Camps presentations, but that is a whole other blog post that will have to come out eventually). Chip has a post on his take on the whole Managing Data Change In Custom Objects (which my view on using Custom Classes instead of DataSets comes thru). And then (thanks to some stuff related to my current project) he takes a walk down the Semantic Web lane.