Software Management

During the last quarter of 2011 we have hosted two amazing Jordanian Microsoft guests, Yousef Al Khalidi (Distinguished Engineer), and Ayman Dahleh (Development Manager for the Global Experience Platform group), who happened to be having their vacation here, they generously accepted our invitation to deliver sessions here in Jordan despite their busy times. The community recorded these two inspiring interviews with our guests through which I can see how close achievements can be. ...

Couple of days ago I tried a key I acquired from Microsoft MSDN subscription to activate an Office installation, the activation didn’t work for some reason, so I filed a ticket, and I thought to myself “Oh great! now I will have to wait for ages until such large corporate like Microsoft would answer my ticket!” ...

It was a very interesting event “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” which took place last Tuesday; the team did a very good job putting it together, it is really great seeing this great effort put into such fruitful events; moving the community steps forward, so thank you AmmanTT team, you rock. Hereby I post the slides I presented in my talk: Software Life Cycle, Humans & Code ...

I will be speaking at “AmmanTT: Developer Edition” next Tuesday 6th of December 2011. Never heard about AmmanTT? quoting from their About page: Coming to you on the first Tuesday of every month is a 2-hour event that brings industry experts, local technologists/engineers, entrepreneurs, idea-generators and just about any enthusiast together in a casual setting to meet and learn from each other I will be talking about the real-life side of the software development life cycle, and about the overlapping between Process and Humans in the cycle. So mark your calendars, I will be very happy to meet you there. ...

Today I was looking for a fast way to find the index of a nth occurrence of a string in a string, so I found this very simple and intuitive site on which you can find and share .net extension methods, the website is http://www.extensionmethod.net Dah! I couldn’t find what I looked for, so I shared my solution here; the website made it crazy easy to share this! Something I definitely would add to my log on how to create wonderful websites, simple and effective. ...

The other day I needed an ASP.NET MVC grid control, and I have always heard about Telerik’s ASP.NET MVC Extensions and the great tools they provide, so I decided to give them a try. So I followed the installation guide step by step, and prepared my code to use the extensions; I added a reference to the DLL, added the scripts, etc… and I thought I was ready to test-drive it. I opened Telerik’s sample website which showed the control and below it the code sample that made it work, innocently enough I did what any other developer would do to try out the sample code: copy and paste it in your page and then build. To my surprise there was an error in the View; it didn’t recognize an Extension method called “Configurator”! ...

Today we came across an interesting issue at work: we have two teams A and B who interchange API calls. Team A needed an API from team B to process a business that is owned by team B of course. The signature was like the following: public OutputEntity MyMethod(List listOfIds); It appeared afterward that this method was very slow, and the client was already very upset about the low performance, which consequently caused big pressure on the teams by the superiors to enhance the performance. After investigating the issue, it appeared that the list of ID’s sent as input consists of some ID’s that do not need to be processed, this criteria of “not need to be processed” is a business owned by team B, done by using properties of the entities these ID’s represent. So the solution to this issue was one of the following: ...

Last Saturday we had a SharePointSaturday event here in Jordan, in which I had the pleasure of interviewing Joel Oleson and Michael Noel for DotNetArabi. At the end of Joel’s valuable interview, which can happen only in a life time, I stopped the recording by hitting the “Stop” button, simple. Surprisingly, instead of stopping the recording, Audacity just froze! I could hear myself screaming inside “NOOO!!!”, I guess even Joel heard that! the whole machine stuck that I had to force it to a Hard Shut down. ...

I just finished a session about Communication Skills one-to-one for the MSP program with Microsoft and Jordev. As I promised the audience, here are the slides shared on the very good site SlideShare: Communication Skills one To one View more presentations from Emad Alashi.

I have been reading this book Growing Software by Louis Testa, and I consider it the book of the year for me. The book is a about how to create a robust successful software; starting from assembling your engineering team, to having a flourishing company with successful software product/services and happy customers. If you are a new Development Manager, or already a Dev. manager who is in a small company growing fast, this book is for you. ...