Andy Palmer

Those of you who have followed my blog, been subjected to it on a client site or have talked to me about programming will know that I have a few issues with checked exceptions. Well, this morning I had an idea of a potentially powerful use of checked exceptions (if only temporarily). The same people [...]

Bob Marshall posted on Twitter: I want to get rid of the habitual naming of methods, like #agile #kanban #lean I replied with: @flowchainsensei sounds like a revolutionary idea. I’m in. now all we need is a name and he replied: @AndyPalmer I want … but seems sadly impractical or contrary to the way humans [...]

There is a story about a cage of monkeys. In the middle of the cage is a ladder and at the top of the ladder is a banana. One of the monkeys climbs the ladder to get the banana, but as he reaches for it, the entire cage becomes electrified and all the monkeys get [...]

Alistair Cockburn uses the term Shu-Ha-Ri regularly to explain different levels of learning. The literal translation is approximately Learn/Follow(Shu), Detach(Ha), Transcend(Ri). A number of people I’ve discussed this with equate these levels to the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. In fact, the Wikipedia article on Dreyfus links back to Shu-Ha-Ri. In my opinion, this is [...]

Imagine, if you will, a Santa’s grotto in a magical department store. Fresh faced children, still glowing from the snowfall outside, line up to greet the jolly man. Joy and laughter can be heard throughout the crowd. Parents breathe a sigh of relief that their children are behaving well. The amazing thing about this particular [...]

Last year, I chose 5 goals. How did I manage with these? Write more (this includes blogging and code) I definitely wrote more code this year, especially early on in the year when Antony and I started Pair With Us. I feel that my blogging is probably around the same amount as previous years. Ideally [...]

I downloaded this Pomodoro Timer from the Apple website. It has support for AppleScript events, so I created a script that automatically sets my Adium status to away (with an auto-reply) while I am working on a Pomodoro and automatically sets it to Available when I have finished. After much messing around, trying to work [...]

Mark Needham’s post on micro types sparked an idea in my head that recently came to fruition. I was pondering on the Narrative Fixture code, and the fact that, although most of the internals are sensibly typed objects, at the FitNesse layer, we do a lot of passing of strings. The idea (at least, my [...]

la⋅zyn⋅chro⋅nous /ˈleɪzɪŋkrənəs/ –adjective having delegated a task with a desired output to a person or group of persons Related forms: la⋅zyn⋅chro⋅nous⋅ly, adverb la⋅zync, abbreviation Examples: Asking your colleague / friend / network a question, where you could find the answer by using a popular search engine, would be a lazynchronous search. Getting Mechanical Turk to [...]

Patrick Kua recently wrote a Guide for Receiving Feedback. He mentions that one way to understand how to receive feedback is to understand how to give it. Here are some suggestions for giving feedback that will help to anchor desirable behaviours and enable change in less desirable behaviours. Give feedback in the second person One [...]