(Cross-posted at Across Moon River)
See also my thoughts on the second book, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.

The One Minute Manager was a quick and easy read, but was packed with quotes for me. I suspect if I wasn’t borrowing this book from a coworker, I would have marked it up similar to my annotations on research papers when I was going through grad school. I enjoyed this book because the advice is easy to implement, but I know also to take it with a grain of salt. That is, the story brings out the best and touches very lightly on the worst. I suppose that is why there is a follow-up “monkey book”, The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey.

I have read two books in the past week about the “One Minute Manager” theme. Originally I thought I was going to combine my review/thoughts in a single post, then I decided I should separate them. I intended to write a review on The One Minute Manager (the “first” book) before reading The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey (the “second” book or the “monkey” book), but I had time to kill while waiting for WiX installation builds to finish.

Now, the monkey book is fresh in my mind and my sister is thumbing through the first book as I write this. As a result, my reviews will be posted in the reverse order in which I read them. In short, I didn’t enjoy the monkey book as much as the first book, though there is still a good amount of ideas on how to better manage your time by managing those you are responsible for.

(Cross-posted at Across Moon River)

I almost bought the Android version of Evoland from the Humble Bundle a month or so ago, thinking I had not yet bought a copy for the PC. Luckily I checked my logs and found that I did buy a copy. 2 years ago. Oops. Well, I finally got around to playing it and thankfully it’s a short game. It’s a nice tribute to popular games from the 8-bit era up to present day, but I was reminded why I wouldn’t be able to play those old RPGs now.

(Cross-posted at Across Moon River)
Brothers – A Tale of Two Sons (Brothers) is one of the most powerful games I’ve played in recent memory. It’s hard to describe a game that is not quite a game, yet it is very much a game. The lack of a UI gives a constant cinematic feel. The lack of an actual language makes you focus on characters’ gestures. All the while, the narrative is simple yet there are strong themes of familial ties as evidenced in the title. Although it took me over a month of on-and-off play, Brothers is only 3 hours of gameplay from start to finish and packs an emotional story with interesting game mechanics. A definite must-play.

(Cross posted at Across Moon River)
I’ve been having a fun month or so bashing my head against the desk, flinging my mouse and keyboard at my cubicle wall, and shaking my fist at my computer. Okay, mainly just shaking my fist at my computer. The Jenkins build server (Windows) is something I’ve been hesitantly touching and handling because I inherited a Java project (my company was traditionally at Windows/.NET shop). Jenkins jobs work fine hooked up to Git (a vendor’s SCM), but as soon as we tried to hook it up to TFS, it’s been erroring out with the strangest GUID that doesn’t map to any user in the TFS system. So, my friend in IT suggested we set up a Linux build server, install Jenkins, and see what we can do from there.

In short, that didn’t work either. So, I found a workaround.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China (ACCC) is one of the first games I’ve completed in a long time. Since I’ve last written a review, I’ve started but lost interest in several games. Off the top of my head they are Darksiders 2, Fallout, and ENSLAVED: Odyssey to the West. I have also played some games on my phone, but I never got far before losing interest.

ACCC was a little bit of fresh air because it wasn’t entirely 3D (and therefore making me nauseous like ENSLAVED) and it was kind of fun playing a 2.5D game that wasn’t a platformer in the traditional sense–my character was able to grasp ledges, maneuver around corners, and swing up agilely. However, it did have its frustrating parts, like the need to have six or more fingers to be able to do certain moves. I’m glad it wasn’t a full AC game and I was eventually able to finish it, though I did get perilously close to not picking it up after a couple of weeks of putting it down.

The Phoenix Project is a fictionalized story about IT life, but it hits so closely to home for those of us in the technology realm that it was pretty stressful to read. Projects are constantly late, resources are over-utilized and scarce, the business is close to being split up because it hasn’t been meeting quarterly estimates, and so on. Anyone who views IT as the department that provides the computers and “keeps the lights on” without appreciating the details of not just the work but the people and politics they have to deal with, this book would provide great insight. This book also provides great insight into four kinds of work and the “Three Ways” of DevOps by example (I do list these in my review so do not continue if you don’t want to be spoiled).

In short, this is a good read. It is much like a self-discovery story where the protagonist is guided along by a guru.

A lot has happened since I was last able to post. The main gist is I’m no longer able to compose entries at work, where most of my topics take place. I sort of don’t have time anymore. However, this particular problem has been bugging me and gave me an excuse to fire up my neglected VM at home to solve it. I can be particularly stubborn, especially when it involves doing all I can to work around Java.

One of my projects is based on an engine that runs from Java. We’re mostly a Microsoft shop. While Java was my first programming language, I have developed a strong dislike for it for a variety of reasons. But, we’re stuck with it. The engine is capable of running JavaScript code using Mozilla’s Rhino engine and it’s got a nifty XML library called E4X. The problem is we can’t easily unit test the JavaScript without firing up the engine and the app.

So, I dug into ways of using the Rhino engine in .NET.

One of the most difficult things to identify are personal assumptions. We can quickly understand new things by making assumptions based on previous, similar things. For example, it is assumed nearly all Windows programs will have a toolbar running across the top with a File option. Under this File option, you typically expect or assume another set of options that may include something like Save, Open, and/or Print.

Personal assumptions are very difficult to identify because they are often so ingrained or, possibly worse, shared among a group that to question it (is it an assumption or is it fact/standard?) is pretty rare. But to ask the right questions can sometimes be eye-opening.

In an attempt to “keep up with the times,” I added Entity Framework 6 (EF) to a project I’m working on. I found out a couple of interesting tidbits, like using a stored procedure for upserts is much faster than coding it in .NET/EF and modifying an entry/row without a primary key in EF can get complex (and difficult). One of the hurdles that my lead brought up was the fact that we can play with EF on dev all we want, but when we push to QA/stage/production–especially to production–we don’t have the connection string and it can get tricky instructing IT on how to properly edit it.

Luckily, there are massive amounts of information out on the web for programmatically creating an EF connection string, but they’re mostly all outdated. Or were code-first. Or have some weird nuance that wasn’t relevant. I’m sure if I took the time to read instead of skimming for the silver bullet, I would have found this solution earlier.