Chad SturtzA Journey Through Software

9 months ago my daughter was born and since then I’ve had trouble finding much time for career development outside of the office.  One of my solutions to the problem was to form a sort of user group in my office that would meet over brown-bag lunch presentations.  I had already given a few brown-bag lunch presentations myself, trying to set an example, but only one other person ever did a presentation.  I thought that if I wrote out what it was I wanted to do and how I expected to to be valuable to our team, maybe there’d be more buy-in.  Plus, if I could get everyone to do just 1 or 2 presentations a year, we could have a meeting every other week.

I approached the entire office with this proposal and was very thrilled to get buy-in from a large percentage of my coworkers.  I volunteered to do the first presentation and asked 2 of my more active coworkers to take care of presentations 2 & 3 just to get things rolling.  Presentation number 3 is next week and after several emails, no one else in the office has volunteered for presentation #4 (or any other future slot).

I found out that for 2 people, the problem was coming up with something to talk about.  I have provided topic ideas as well as offered to brainstorm with anyone that was willing to present but unsure of a topic.  Still… no one has offered to present.

At this point I’m assuming it won’t pan out.  I felt it was acceptable to send a few emails stating that we needed people for upcoming presentations seeing as how I got a large amount of buy-in before this whole thing started, but I’m not going to push it.  If no one comes forward, I’ll just continue giving presentations when I can hoping that maybe someone else will jump in every once in a while.

I have to admit, I’m a little confused as to why so many people thought it was a good idea but then won’t participate.  I even found out that for presentation #2 (I was out sick), no one set up a virtual meeting or conference call for the few remote people assigned to our office.  Furthermore, those remote people never IM’d, emailed, or called anyone asking what number to call in on or for an invitation to the virtual meeting.  Maybe I’m the only one that feels there’s value here…

For pure curiosity reasons, I wanted to know the ratio of lines of code to unit tests.  I’m writing all production code in Java and tests in Groovy.

LOC

Finding the lines of code:    grep -v -r –include=”*.java” “^[[:space]]*$” * | wc -l

Number of Tests

grep -r –include=”*Test.groovy” “@Test” * | wc -l

Results

LOC: 706, Tests: 82

This yields a ratio of:   8.6 to 1

1. Skip Inbox

When filtering incoming mail, if it’s not something you need to read as soon as you have time, just tell it to skip the inbox.  This will cause the email to be immediately archived, but keeps it marked as unread.  This works especially well for many of the automated emails you receive from companies and websites (like Facebook) and gets you one step closer to Inbox Zero.

2. Hide Read Lables

Go into Settings and then to Labs.  Find “Hide Read Labels”, and enable it.  This causes labels that don’t contain any unread email to be hidden from view.  It keeps your screen a little less cluttered and allows you to focus on new emails.  Your labels are still very easy to reach, just start typing the label name in the search bar and it will pop up as one of the auto-fill options.

More to come as i figure them out!

About a year ago, I stopped blogging publicly.  It really just came down to a change in priorities for a while.  However, I’m back and excited to get going again.  This site is very likely to change over the next little while.  I just picked the first decent theme I could find to get things up going.

Anyway… welcome and hopefully you find something I write to be educational, thought provoking or entertaining.

-Chad