Movember

This year I’m participating (for the first time) in Movember! This involves growing a hideous moustache to raise awareness for prostate cancer and other men’s health issues. Obligatory photos to follow. Anyone who is willing to support me ’sight unseen’ can go to my donation page. I know that readers of this blog are very generous, and won’t hesitate to dig deep for a great cause!

Update: Day 9 – how time flies! I know I only posted this morning, but still…

Forgive the shocking image quality. A David Niven moustache has been requested. Unless there’s a higher bidder, I think that’s how I’ll have to go!

Oxfam Trailwalker

Anyone want to do the Oxfam Trailwalker? Seems I’ve been somewhat tardy getting a team together… the places available for those willing to commit to raising $1000+ filled up within a day. Which means now, the minimum fund raising to enter is $3000. Anyone game?

Test driven design

I don’t know quite what it is, but something about test-driven development (TDD) appeals to me. Perhaps it strikes a chord with my fundamental belief that machines should do the work so that people have time to think. Or perhaps it’s because TDD appeals to my anal nature. Whatever the case is, I like any opportunity to automate things, and although I’ve never done any, TDD seems to an absolutely brilliant way to spend one’s days.

Only down side is – I’m on an integration project at the moment, and so the opportunity for TDD is limited, right? Well, it might be a wee bit harder, but we shouldn’t let that stand in the way. ThoughWorks have a whitepaper (written by Gregor Hohpe and Wendy Istvanick) that talks about their approach to TDD in enterprise integration projects.

It lays out really clearly all the component pieces needed to overcome the challenges in creating automated tests for enterprise integration solutions, and gives some pretty good advise on designing for testability – which is probably not on our radar at the moment.

Might just drop this on the test analysts desk come Monday.