Ryan Rinaldi

Programming by coincidence

Ryan Rinaldi — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 09:38:07 GMT

I’m using Twitter. Follow me @rrinaldi

As a developer it’s of super duper importance that we understand what each and every line of code that we write does and how it works. While a lot of code that we write leverages libraries to provide wonderful abstractions over complex implementations we owe it to ourselves, the businesses that we work for and other developers on our teams to understand what these libraries are doing and how they are doing it.

But why? Because when they fail (and they will fail!) you need to know where to begin troubleshooting and without an understanding of what the code is doing you are up a creek. So since you can’t troubleshoot you need to find an alternate implementation that does work. But an alternate implementation of what?!? You don’t have the foggiest idea what the code was doing in the first place so how can you write (or, sigh, find) code that does the same *thing* but in a different way?

This leads developers to go down the rabbit hole of CPDD (Copy Paste Driven Development). A few copy-pastes later from the

bathroom wall of code and you have a mess of code that nobody really understands but “works” (for a very small value of “works”). Now you back where you started. A bunch of code that appears to be doing what you want and you are oblivious to the implementation details.

So the next time you are copying some code from Stack Overflow do me a favor, heck do us all a favor, and just ask yourself “What is this code doing?”. Once you have the answer, and you are satisfied that it is working the way you really intended feel free to paste away. But until then, don’t infect your codebase with germy disgusting code that you got off the bathroom wall.

MIX10 – Windows 7 Series Phone Architecture

Ryan Rinaldi — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:49:02 GMT

Rearchitected from the ground up

Hardware Architecture

Capacitive touch – 4 or more contact points
Sensors

GPS
Accelerometers
Compass
Light
Proxmity

Camera
Multimedia
Memory
GPU
CPU
Only 2 resolutions

Software Architecture

Built on WinCE
MS is writing almost all of the device drivers instead of OEM
App updating, Licensing built in
New UI model

Shell frame
Direct3D

XBox LIVE, Bing, Location, Push notifications
Apps all built on CLR (no unmanaged code)
Silverlight, XNA, HTMl/JavaScript
Frameworks built for you to access all phone features

App Model

What is an app?

Uniquely identifiable and servicable product packaged as XAP

Application deployment

Windows phone marketplace

Application license

Crypto-verifable object issued to grant rights to the applications

Phone only installs .xap pakcages signed by marketplace
phone handles all aspects of .xap installation based on manifest

you cannot make arbitrary changes to the phone during install

Users control install, update and uninstall, while the marketplace controls revocation
Phone only runs apps that have a valid marketplace license
Apps are sandboxed into separate security accounts while installed and at runtime
Resource allocation policy keeps the foreground app responsive
Resource management policy ensures the user can always use Start to run an app.
App hosting

Each app executes inside an isolated, least-privileged host process
all app code is transparent and CLS-verifiable
Frameworks enable app code to interact with app model, UI model, phone functionality

Frameworks

CLR
Silverlight
Device & phone
Cloud

UI Model

Concepts

Application – UI and logic for functionality exposed through pages
Page a single screen of user interaction elements
Session – An ordered workflow of user interactions spanning applications

UI metaphor – Web
Sessions can be paged out when inactive.
Page State – Contains data that describes an instance of a page, analogous to browser cookie

Allows the phone to discard all UI info when app is inactive
Rehydrates page ui based on Page State info

Graphics composition

Each page gets it’s own layer on top of the Direct3D surface

Cloud Integration Services

built-in user experiences and APIs
Familar APIs for interactingwith existing web 2.0 services
Rich support for incorporating custom web services
Location Service

support for consuming GPS, AGPS and Wi-Fi based location
reverse geo-coding

Push notification service

Managed APIs for notification-driven interaction
When battery is low the service may shut down
This is not guaranteed message delivery.
Based on the state of the phone, message could be delayed, batched, or dropped.

Gamer Services APIs

Mercurial? sure, why not?

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 11:18:40 GMT

Some of the new super cool things on the block are Distributed Version Control Systems and being somebody that is into super cool new things I figured I would spend some time and get to know them.

A couple months ago Steve and I had a hack-a-thon weekend and he introduced me to Git. I have to say that I didn’t really like Git. I found it a bit cumbersome and confusing. Honestly, that is probably more my fault than Git’s because I had no idea how DVCSs worked and Git is a little to powerful to be put in the hands of a novice. Needless to say handing me Git was like handing me a .45 and pointing it at my foot. It was only a matter of time until I shot myself.

So after blowing off both of my feet and a few other appendages I wrote DVCS off as a bad idea. Luckily Joel Spolsky wrote a very awesome intro to Mercurial that peeked my interest again. Reading the intro filled in a lot of the blanks in my mental model of how DVCS works. I suggest you spend some time reading the intro and then do as I did and go purchase the really awesome Mastering Mercurial series from TekPub. Once you watch that I think you’ll find Mercurial (and Git) a very compelling SCM solution. I found it compelling enough to get a Kiln account and try it out on a real honest to goodness (private) project.

MIX10 – ASP.NET MVc bootcamp

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 10:37:14 GMT

Presented by Jon Galloway (Twitter, Blog, Podcast)

2 different templates for MV2

MVC 2 Web Application
MVC 2 Empty Web Application

(BTW, this is code heavy demo so there might not be a lot of notes.)

I’m going to point out that Jon couldn’t get his first demo to compile. :P

We are building a store

Home page
Store
- List page
- Details page

Routes map between URLs and Controller Actions.

Controller actions and views are mapped by convention.

New HtmlHelper in MVC2 – EditorFor and EditorForModel (Interesting stuff!)

Support for Display and Editor templates

(Templating stuff looks very interesting. Need to find a real project to try this stuff out on.)

MIX10 – Design Fundamentals for Developers – Part 2

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 07:32:36 GMT

Design is composition

Everything needs to work together and support each other

“Unity”

Determines the total impact of a design
Unity is relationships

Manage relationships so the work together

Order

Simple
Triumph of design is Complex Seems Simple

Grid

Things that are close together and aligned are implicitly connected
The Grid is old. Simple grids used in scrolls way back when
old old old old old

Appeals to us and our sense of order.
Powerful way to organize a lot of information.
Zune app is a great example of grid layout
The grid is made to be broken.

Dominance

Things that are more dominant on a page are more important

Size, color or shape

Dominance matters when you have density in information.
Sometimes Dominance is an entry point or sometimes it’s a way to show relative importance of different things
Don’t use too much dominance

Hierarchy

3 levels of hierarchy works. More than that really doesn’t

Important
unimportant
everything else

Containment

Harmony

To make harmony use theme

“On the road” by Jack Kerouac – Read it
Speakvisual.com – Great use of theme

Gestalt

tendency to perceive things holistically and find meaning in the way the parts relate
Similiarity – implied realtionship between things that are the same
Contrast – things that are different are implicilty somehow different

Color
Shipe
size
position
orientation

Avoid the trap of “sameness”.
Increase contrast and you have the ability to say more things

increases your visual “vocab”

Chunking
Figure/Ground

What’s on top and what’s the background

Closure

Use negative space to imply other shapes

Good Continuation

Balance

Whitespace

Negative space
Empty space

Empty space doesn’t have to be empty (WTF)

Same damn thing as figure/ground

Yes, space can be wasted
Empty space is not wasted space (sometimes)
Empty space is not there to be filled. It is there to be manipulated.
Benefits

Feeling of quality
Legibility and readability
Reinforce order and structure.
Create interest.

MIX10 – Design Fundamentals for Developers

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 06:14:19 GMT

Just arrived in my first workshop. (And yes, I was able to knock the cobwebs loose and I remembered which workshops I signed up for!)

Presentation is by Robby Ingebretsen – Created KAXAML

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Design is everywhere and design touches everything. The process of design is the process of creating.

We all need to consider the implications of design.

If you create things, you design them.

Stop evaluating yourself as a developer versus designer. Just be both.

Time for us to get Smart about design

Improve design vocab

Add to design knowledge

Increase design confidence

Design

Design is order
The more “invisible” the design the better the design is
Design should “fad away”
Design is problem solving

Check out the book “How to Think Like a Great Graphic Designer”.

Be empathetic. Put yourself in end users shoes. It allows you to communicate with them in more effective ways.

Art has a subjective goal. It is something that you want to make.

Design has an objective goal. You are trying to create something that solves a problem.

Design by

Process
People
Synthesis

Creative process is really 2 things: Flow and Edit

First part of flow is research.

After research is brainstorming

Apple uses a 10/3/1 rule

Come up with 10 pixel perfect designs
Choose 3
Refine those 3
Choose 1

“Babies” and “Ponies”

“Babies” - Don’t fall in love with designs that you spend a lot of time on if they don’t solve the problem
“Ponies” – Things that stakeholders want that don’t add to the design.

Process docs

Brief

Kick off a project
Spec

Pitch

A first response to the creative brief
In the end you need to land on a direction to go

Wireframe/Sketch

Describes the Information architecture
layout
Navigation
user flow
high level information structure

Interaction Spec

Doc that describes how people will interact between the design and observer

Motion guide

a guide to the personality and tone of the of the animation and movement in the application

Comp

establish the final visual design

Prototype

a complete or semi-complete sample of the final design

Love the quote “Saul Bass is awesome” :P

“Anybody in the room can be a great designer, err at least a passable one” – At least he is honest!

The trick to being a great designer is:

Hard work
Observe the world around you synthesize it.

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More after the break. :)

MIX10 – Expect many posts

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:15:54 GMT

Just like every other conference I go to, I will be writing a blog post for each session I attend. My coworkers Steve and Angela (no url for her, yet!) are in this session with me and I believe Steve will also be blogging a bit during MIX so feel free to check out his site for more info.

MIX10 – Day 0

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 04:00:12 GMT

Getting all set for a day of pre-con sessions. Already caffeinated and just waiting for my lazy coworkers to get downstairs so we can get all registered!

I hope the tell me what pre-con sessions I signed up for. I completely forgot what which one I have this morning!

Research and Prototyping with Scrum.

Ryan Rinaldi — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 01:04:26 GMT

Today is day 3 of our first Sprint. Yesterday was our first Daily Scrum and so far I’m digging it but I don’t have enough experience to really know if Scrum “is working” yet.

When we were doing our Sprint Planning meeting it became exceptionally clear to me that it’s really, really hard to create 4-16 hour tasks when a lot of a Sprint involves research & prototyping. We are working on implementing an Enterprise Service Bus and for this first Sprint a lot of us have to spend some time just learning the tooling. How do you plan tasks effectively when you have no real idea how long something is going to take? We wound up actually trying to plan how we will go about doing our research and how long we will spend on prototypes but it just feels like those sprint tasks are wild ass guesses.

In the future I’m going to advocate that we break the 4-16 hour task rule when we don’t know the potential solution and use “Spikes”, “Tracer Bullets”, and “Research” to wrap our heads around the Product Backlog before we do a Sprint Planning.

Scrum: One team multiple projects?

Ryan Rinaldi — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 15:05:29 GMT

At work we are in the process of implementing Scrum (actually tomorrow is our first Sprint Planning meeting. Really looking forward to it.)

Everybody on the team has read the books on Scrum and we are all very excited to finally be formalizing our processes but we are in disagreement about how best to actually implement Scrum.

The problem is that we are a small team responsible for a set of pretty independent applications. All of these applications are in various states:

“Done” – These apps only see bug fixes and very small feature work. Until the business processes around them change there will be little to no work required to maintain them.
“Maintenance” – Apps that are recently released. As the business adopts them they will require small feature changes and bug fixes.
“Greenfield” – Brand new apps that haven’t yet reached 1.0. Lots of work.

Greenfield apps have more than enough work to fill a sprint. Maintenance and Done apps, not so much. So how do you fit work on projects into a sprint if each app has it’s own backlog but might not have enough work for a full sprint?

I’ve searched for an answer and I’ve found the following sites that address it but nobody seems to be in complete agreement.

We have tentatively agreed that we will have one Product Backlog for all of our projects and a sprint can (and probably will) include work for multiple projects. We will have one person that will manage the Product Backlog and will work with the various Product Owners to make sure they understand how and why the work for their projects is placed in the Product Backlog.

So to all the Scrum people out there, is this a common scenario? Is one Product Backlog for multiple projects seem like a reasonable idea? If not how else can we address our situation?