Everyone dealt with it in some form of another. Either you have given your estimations and you missed it by a long shot or someone handed you some estimations and they grossly underestimated the amount of work. And when that mark is missed, its the wag of the finger and the rain cloud of shame upon you. Management has deemed you a failure. Way to go.
But why does it happen as often? Are they the same constant hurdles over and over? Is it management? Lack of tools? Bad team? Or dare I say, was it you? (Of course not, its never OUR fault). Who are making the estimations? Is it you? Your team leader? Marketing? Upper management? For me, I can see mostly from the developers point of view because, hey, I am not a manager. Here are some of the issues I have ran into over the various projects and possible ways to avoid them in the future.
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Marcel Best Practices, Opinion Best Practices, Learn This
In one of my previous articles, I spoke about how to use Fabrication, or at least one portion of Fabrication (respondTo and reactTo). Given that there are other really cool things about Fabricaiton, I felt it deserved some more attention. One thing Fabrication supports are interceptors. Interceptors allow you to stop the normal flow of your notification to your commands or mediators. You can stop the notification, alter them, even send a different notification in its place. In this article, I will be focusing on a few different uses for interceptors.
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Marcel Flex, tutorial fabrication, Flex, howto, tutorial
Recently at work, I was approached by my boss and was tasked with estimating how long it would take to fix a list of bugs. I accepted and said I would have the estimation come end of day. Then I found out which project this was for. It was *THE* project. Every company has this project. It’s the project that no one likes working on. The codebase is horrible, poorly designed and could be described as brittle at best. The problem isn’t just the code looks bad, it is just that to fix a bug in here causes a rippling effect through out program.
Instead of offering a time estimation, my manager got something pretty much every manager hates to get. She got a list of what needs to be rebuilt and how long it should take. Almost everywhere you read, they say rebuilding an application should never happen. I can agree with this to a point. When developers use that word “rebuild”, they often use it like a child who just found their father’s gun in the closet. It can be dangerous and not treating this with careful planning and consideration, you will be rebuilding yourself right into a corner.
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Marcel Best Practices, Opinion, Random Notes Best Practices, howto
With PDFs becoming more and more prevalent in todays world, if you are doing any sort of exporting or sales, generating PDFs is probably going to find its way into your program. Using iText, you are given a large amount of functionality in order to create custom PDFs on the fly. This article will be focusing on how to generate an PDF for a sales receipt. With this, I will show how easily you can setup tables, images, barcodes, and links.
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Marcel java, tutorial howto, itext, java, tutorial
I love writing for this blog. It really wasn’t that long ago that I started taking it more serious and try to make time in my day to post new content. Whenever I post a new story, I check my stats within wordpress to make sure that the correct article was posted, see if things are getting recognized, etc. Usually, depending on the time of day/night, after the first halfhour/hour, ill get roughly 20 or so hits. After posting my last article at 11:30pm EST on a Monday, I followed my standard routine to check. I quickly noticed that I was at 250 hits in 30 minutes of posting. Automatically I thought ‘well something is wrong”, then I realized that I was getting a large amount of traffic from Reddit, as it apparently caught some attention there. Now that the time has past and Reddit has forgotten about me, so I wanted to do a “back to normal” article and show what you get whenever your story becomes popular on Reddit.
I remember back when I enjoyed trolling through posts on Digg, I would always get offended if someone blatantly posted on article there to get hits. “They just want ad revenue!”. Other times, I would click an article and get the ‘bandwidth exceed’ message. “Bandwidth exceed” was at least a sign the server didn’t crash, sometimes it would just crash the server. I use GoDaddy, so I wasn’t too concerned about that, but still. Here is how all these things turned out, before and after.
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Marcel Opinion, Random Notes