Ivan Mitev In The Software Trenches: Summary of the year 2005

I am a fen of all kinds of reports, so let me summarize the tech part of my life for the past 2005 below:

Work related activities

The year 2005 was definitely .NET centric and my list of .NET resources was growing slowly but steadily along the way. After my first attempt to design a reusable Data Access Layer (it was based on attributes and sub-classing), I got in the ORM world. I got to know more about multithreading and numbers.

I changed my job to work on an interesting .NET project. In its initial phase I had a chance to learn cool stuff like Enterprise Library (actually we decided not to use it). Wrestled with Excel Processing. Got to like Bugzilla. Wrestled with POP3 and MIME in a series of posts first, second, third, fourth. Ranted about GUI design. Wrote a postmortem when the project was done. In November the project was restarted and I have been doing some maintenance programming and it sometimes felt scary.

Did an extensive MC++ and C++\CLI research before actually porting a small app from C++ to C# (it turned out to be one month of wasted effort, but I learned interesting things along the way).

Did an ASP.NET project that I called BugTracktor as a skill acquisition and demonstration. My review on existing ASP.NET bug trackers got larkwared and my weblog visits increased 10 times for a week (just to drop to nearly the original level after that ()

Other technology related activities

Became co-author of two chapters and a reviewer of 7 more for the Bulgarian .NET book. The first volume was released online for free and already sells as hardcopy.

Started my thesis for my masters program. After thinking about some cool ideas, then thinking of some boring ones (, I stopped at Agile Metrics. Did some research on how to measure agility and investigated applicable literature and came up with some practical ideas and investigated free metrics tools for .NET code. Looked for Bulgarian resources on agility and after not finding many, translated some.

Continued blogging throughout the year and reached more than 100 posts for 2005.

Notable Reading

Read the excellent article Big Ball Of Mud and in later stages of my project it helped me get a clear sense about the status.

Design: Documentation or Code – after reading a post by Martin Fowler and the classic essays by Jack W. Reeves I got clear on this topic

Peopleware 2nd Edition – great book that Joel Spolsky recommends to be read at least once an year.

Pragmatic Unit Testing – great book to point me that what I was doing most of the time was actually not unit testing, but just automated one.

Halfway through Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code and Working Effectively with Legacy Code – I better have a set of handy techniques by my side to put some scary code under control.