Author Archives: ChrisEdwards

Improving the Developer Culture at Your Workplace

By ChrisEdwards | Published: July 27, 2010

Here are some of the things we do here at BancVue to help keep our developer culture healthy and strong. They are things you can do to improve the developer culture at your work. Many of these things can be started by anyone at the company, though a few may require management approval or financial […]

Posted in Continuous Learning, Leading, Mentoring | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Be a Mentor, Not a Critic

By ChrisEdwards | Published: July 11, 2010

This quote was posted on twitter last week and really stuck with me, "Be a mentor, not a critic." I don’t remember who posted it, but it really made me think about my attitude at work. I like to think of myself as a mentor. I try to help others become better developers. I make […]

Posted in Leading, Mentoring, Soft Skills | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Antipattern: The Bloated Configuration File

By ChrisEdwards | Published: July 7, 2010

Configuration files should contain only the values the end users will need to configure. Everything else should be in code. One problem with WCF is the size of the configuration files. They contain so much data they are unreadable. Its such a problem that Microsoft provides the WCF Configuration Editor to ease developers pain when […]

Posted in .NET, Configuration, Principles | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Entities, Services & Resources—Three Categories of Objects

By ChrisEdwards | Published: June 27, 2010

After working with domains for several years I find that there are three major categories of objects I work with: Entities, Services, and Resources. There are clear distinctions between these categories in their purpose, content, dependencies and roles. Understanding these categories clarifies what dependencies I should allow, what purpose the objects serve, and how I […]

Posted in Design, Mocking, Patterns, Principles, Testing | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fighting Perfectionism—What Is Good Enough?

By ChrisEdwards | Published: June 24, 2010

Perfectionism is a disability deceptively disguised as technical proficiency. It is adds risk to a project while deceiving the developer to believe they are doing the right thing. Where do you draw the line and stop refactoring knowing the code is good enough? Perfectionism is something I have struggled with for a long time. I […]

Posted in Agile, Perfectionism, Soft Skills | Tagged , , | Leave a comment