Blog Archives

Dear StackExchange: Will You Be My Valentine?

With all due respect to my partner, I am totally in love with StackExchange, the network of Q&A sites that began with StackOverflow and, over the last few years, has blossomed into one of the best communities I have ever seen on the interwebs.

I don’t say things like that lightly. I mean, I’m one of those grumbly old jaded “get offa my lawn, you!” people who has been working and building things on the web for a really long time (18 freaking years, if you’re counting at home). I’ve kept my distance from discussion/Q&A forums and listservs in recent years for a few reasons, boiled down to these: a lot of people are jerks, and a lot of people don’t even try to help themselves—both of these factors just waste everyone’s time, effort, and goodwill, and those are things I let affect me far more than I should.

But given the new year (always a good time to start new things), time on my hands after quitting my job, and a deep desire to get back to my roots (firmly planted outside of academia), I decided to commit time to becoming a good community member at StackExchange. Since I follow both Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) and Joel Spolsky (@spolsky) on Twitter and have read/enjoyed/learned from each of their blogs for a long time, I figured if there was going to be any network that I embedded myself within, it was going to be one that they started.
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Thoughts on Code Year, Codecademy, and Learning to Code

By going one click away from this post you’ll see that I’ve spent the last twelve years writing books specifically geared to the newbie coder—be it someone who wants to learn the markup language of HTML, the style sheet language of CSS, the query language for relational database systems, the client-side programming language of JavaScript, or the server-side programming language of PHP (or, in fact, all of them together). As I wrote a few weeks ago, learning from tech books is not dead. But it’s not the only way to learn; straight up learning from a book doesn’t work for everyone, and certainly not every tech book pays attention to pedagogy (I do, with the help of all of my editors who keep me honest).

Then again, neither does every online learning environment. Do any?

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This is What I Do

The other day I wrote up a “it’s June 1st, sounds like a good time for a quick status update” email for my bosses, and in doing so stepped back for a second and said “holy crap—we’re really doing a lot.” It’s true, we are. “We” in this case is the Online Library Environment group at University of Virginia Library. Seven super people (three senior engineers, a senior programmer, two programmer/analyst/DBAs, and a librarian/project manager) report to me, and I report to a director who reports to the Deputy University Librarian. Like I said in my post about an internal presentation I gave on the development lifecycle, my group is responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department who have their own highly valued areas of expertise (e.g. librarians, archivists, media specialists, etc.)

The reason I thought about writing this blog post was because this morning I had the opportunity to see some of the folks at the NINES / NEH Summer Institutes for Evaluating Digital Scholarship…not because I was participating in the institute in any way, but because I was on my way downstairs to get coffee and the participants were all working in the beautiful, wonderful, comfortable Scholars’ Lab. I was able to talk for a few moments with some scholars I like and respect very much, and one of them (Amy Earhart, if you’re playing along at home, who—to reiterate—is pretty great!) asked me what project I’m working on right now.

Project, singular.

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a short presentation: "Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release"

In my capacity as Lead Technologist/Chief Architect for the Online Library Environment at the University of Virginia Library, I manage a group of people who are responsible for many of the public-facing web services that the Library provides plus the technologies that sit behind those interfaces. Almost every project we take on is driven by stakeholders outside of our department (e.g. non-developers, or people not versed in technical matters) who have their own highly valued areas of expertise.

This is a relatively new department; it wasn’t fully staffed until I got here in January. As you can imagine, any processes we’ve recently started to implement (e.g. having processes for starting/working through projects) require a lot of training and reiteration of norms and ideals. Within the Library we have several interest groups that meet regularly to talk about current and future projects, possibilities, questions, and so on; one of those groups is the User Experience (UX) interest group. People from all departments and at all levels (from the University Librarian on down the line) come to these meetings to hear presentations and ask questions.

Today I took the opportunity to talk briefly about how we in OLE work with the specific UX folks (Joe Gilbert and Erin Mayhood, if we’re naming names, which I am) in the service of our stakeholders and their projects. Specifically, I discussed what we expect stakeholders (project instigators!) to do, and what we do with that information, how we communicate throughout a project, and so on. These slides are pretty generic (and my presentation was only 15 minutes) but it was another opportunity to get in people’s minds how we as developers don’t (or shouldn’t) just come up with stuff on our own and decide willy-nilly to do something. There’s actually a process!

(The titles of the slides are: functional requirements, example functional requirement, writing use cases (or epics), writing stories, an actual example, writing code, never stop communicating, releasing)

Here are the slides themselves (view at slideshare.net if they do not appear below):

Development Lifecycle: From Requirement to Release
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went to MITH, did a little song and dance…

Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending time with friends/colleagues at MITH (the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities), as they invited me to say a few words for a session in their Digital Dialogues speaker series.

I took the opportunity to say a few words about something fundamental to my work here at UVa Library, and that is the Hydra Project. The abstract for my talk read as follows, and I actually discussed most of the things listed here:

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