Dean Wampler's Blog

Several years ago, while I worked for Object Mentor, I blogged about an old friend, Master Chef Rino Baglio. I described some of the lessons I learned from him about craftsmanship and how they apply to software development.

Yesterday, I read a blog post by Christopher Cribb that contained another Chef anecdote that shows the same fanatical commitment to quality. Chistopher is a Kansas City-based wine importer who visited Chicago’s Fronterra Grill recently. Fronterra is the famous Mexican Restaurant owned by Chef Rick Bayless. Bayless won one of those master chef competitions recently, so now his restaurants are even more popular (and hard to get into) than they were before.

Christopher’s blog post is actually about wine pairings with spicy foods (and worth reading for that discussion alone). Along the way, he describes observing Bayless eating his own dinner at the bar. When he started to eat the fish entree, he immediately took it back to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later, the head chef brought him a new plate and apologized for whatever transgression Bayless discovered.

It’s easier to just let subpar work go uncorrected, but Bayless is so successful because he’ll send a subpar dish back to the kitchen. When was the last time you said “no” to subpar work in your software project?

I just completed a search for a new job. In these economic times, finding a job can be daunting, even in the software industry, which has fared better than most. (Today, it was announced that the official unemployment rate in the U.S. is 10.2%, the highest level in 25 years.) A job search can be harder if you're a software developer of a certain age (I turn the big Five-Oh in January).

Despite these obstacles, this was the easiest and most rewarding job search of my career. I had the good fortune to receive several excellent job offers. I regret that I had to turn down all but one of the opportunities. (I start at DRW Holdings after Thanksgiving.)

Read the rest of this entry

I got sufficiently frustrated with Windows that I installed Kubuntu on my Thinkpad in a dual-boot configuration. (I'll have to use Windows occasionally.) This will give me a real developer's OS while I wait until I can justify buying a Powerbook. ;) Linux as a desktop OS could really replace Windows, if it had the polish that Windows and OS X have. (Yea, I know that there are a lot of enterprise apps that aren't compatible...) I still haven't gotten my laptop to talk to my WiFi router that's using WPA for security. Also, there are way too many configuration options and the out-of-the box "look and feel" is ugly, even while much more attractive options are a few (hundred?) clicks away. So, it's still way beyond the capabilities of the average computer user to use Linux on the desktop, IMHO. It's been getting better, though, and the Ubuntu project, in particular, is promising. Hopefully, linux will still grow as a desktop OS, although I suspect that most companies and individuals who can drop Windows will chose OS X, instead.

I'm happy to report that I joined Object Mentor (http://www.objectmentor.com) as of a few weeks ago. I will continue to blog on AOP here, but for blogs on general topics, please see http://butunclebob.com.

I'm looking for an excuse to retire my (almost new) ThinkPad and replace it with a new MacBook Pro. I use an iMac at home, but I foolishly bought the ThinkPad believing it would integrate better into my client's environments.

Actually, when I've taken my old G3 PowerBook to client offices, it's always been easier to integrate into their networks than the ThinkPad, but today I discovered yet another reason why Mac OSX is a better business OS.

I bought a Targus Wireless Presenter, since I give a lot of presentations. The documentation says it supports a PC only. Yet, try as I might, I can't get it to work on my ThinkPad. So, for grins, I plugged it into my iMac. The iMac figured it was some sort of wierd keyboard, but guess what? It works just fine with PowerPoint on my Mac.

Now that you can run Windows and OSX simultaneously (and well) on the new Intel-based Macs, why would you ever buy PC hardware again?

Okay, maybe to run a *nix variant...