Monday, December 06, 2004

The Spolsky NetSeminar

Anyone who's involved with software development or management should read Joel Spolsky's blog. Actually, if you're in this field it's likely that's redundant advice - you already do. Spolsky is an ex-Microsoftie who seems to have an abundance of solid common sense and I'm always excited to read his entries as they come out. So I was pretty keen to listen to a NetSeminar that he was involved with. Pity it meant getting up at 6 am, damn awkward time zone differences!

Anyway, I got up and sat my bleary eyes in front of the PC and tuned in. So how was it? OK, but not worth losing sleep over. I enjoyed when Spolsky spoke - I'm currently doing a lot of GUI development and he was talkin' my lingo - but there was a lot of coverage of the sponsor's (Electric Cloud) product which was particularly uninteresting to me. For two reasons - it was a completely different topic (distributed provessing to improve build times) to that which Joel was talking and thus the seminar felt very disjointed. Secondly, our company doesn't use makefiles and can't use Electric Clouds (apparently very effective) system[1].

So, a little disappointing.

Hopefully Joel will participate in more seminars in the future and will be able to cover more material...



[1] Incidently, we have trialled Incredibuild and have found it very effective, we were about this close to purchasing...if you're using C++ under Visual Studio and your build times are getting outta control give it a shot.

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