Mark Twain described Huck as having no real career. Everything Huck did was part of his career. I have a similar feeling about my job. I program, that's how it started. But, then I learned about people. Then I learned about management, dark and light arts. A couple of years ago I started studying, quite seriously, broader subjects. Economics, faith, creation. I can't blog about them here. The bad language upsets customers; the material is not relevant to those who want software help. However, I can blog about these ideas here:

The German media branded them “Germany’s dumbest bankers” but two Board members and a senior risk controller of the state owned KfW Bank were suspended then sacked two weeks later. They were blamed for a transfer of 350 million euros to the US Lehman Brothers, 2 hours before Lehman’s declared bankruptcy despite saturation media reporting of Lehman’s troubles.

Have you ever written code that directly used the .NET File APIs? We probably all did although we knew it would make the code less testable and dependent on the file system state. As bad as it sounds, it really requires a lot of discipline and work to avoid this: one would need to create an abstraction layer over the file system, which is not a short task (think long/tedious).

// in how many ways can this
break? public static void CleanDirectory(string path)
{ if (Directory.Exists(path)) Directory.Delete(path, true); Directory.CreateDirectory(path);
} 

Abstraction

Wonder what we’ve been up to for the last months… We’ve been building a very cool development experience on top of Pex that we call Code Digging. Check out Nikolai’s blog post on what it means to you!       .