The Retrospector

For the last couple years I’ve been getting a bunch of magazines delivered to my work address. The IT Publications banner to the right is a link to where I ordered them all. Having a stack of publications related to your line of work, even if it’s just somewhat related can benefit you in a number of ways, and I’m going to share with you the few things I think benefit me.

If you want to give one or two of them a try, know that I’ve gotten zero spam whatsoever from ordering them other than renewal notices each year. This year I think I’ve signed up for about 7-8 of them, and though I don’t read them all every time they show up I manage to leave the latest copies out for all to see.

Benefits of publications with your name on them

The first benefit that comes to mind when having publications around the office whether it be on your desk or on a periodicals rack where everyone shares them is having your name on the address field. It’s not always the first thing everyone looks at when picking up a magazine, but it’s very common for management to take a look at where this magazine is coming from.

You not only get credit for having ordered relevant material for others to check out or peruse between meetings, but your name is associated with being up to date having been delivered recent news and being interested in keeping up with relevant case studies or articles in your field.

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Funny thing this is. About one month ago I decided to start this blog. I’ve got some pretty reasonable goals in mind from what I can tell by the feedback in the group writing project I participated in on blogging goals. I certainly didn’t expect the kind of results that I had, and I’ll probably be the next edge case that has a little more attention for awhile before everyone moves on to the next flavor of the day that made more money than it should have.

Types of income

I’d like to take a second to point out the types of income that a blog can have. The key here is that there’s more than one kind. The $88.51 did not come from just direct methods, but some indirect methods as well. (Direct methods being advertising income, or anything on the site that generates money. Indirect methods being income that generates because of your blog or as a result of having it.)

The breakdown

I know everyone’s first curiosity lies with where the money came from. I’ll give a general breakdown and explain a little about the indirect earners.

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I’ve actually had this conversation come up twice the last couple weeks without instigating it myself so I thought I’d go ahead and cover the topic. Both people were on completely different sides of the argument as to whether or not team building exercises were a benefit to the company in the end. Personally, I lean toward it being a general waste of time, but I can also understand why it is beneficial to some.

Today I’ll describe my experience with “team building days” and toss out some pros and cons on why a company would want to promote them. Is it something for your company? You’ll have to be the judge of that.

Building an “egg catcher”

One day out of nowhere at a large company I was working for right out of college, the program manager announced that we were all to meet in the cafeteria for an all-day team-building meeting. I’d never seen one, and was a little annoyed that I wasn’t going to be able to finish the stuff I was working on. However I was sort of excited for the change of pace.

When I got down there, I saw him standing next to 6 tables with a big pile of sticks and pillowcases. The day was reserved for the entire room of 50 people to split up into 6-7 teams (I can’t remember exactly, there were a lot of us) with the goal of producing an egg catcher out of popsicle sticks, a pillowcase, twine, and a bucket. The catch was, all the little sub-departments were shuffled up and sent to all different teams. Each team was made up of people from different groups that didn’t normally work together.

At the end of the day, the program manager went around and dropped an egg from 4ft off the floor to see if each device would prevent it from breaking as was supposed to end up in the bucket on the floor. I think only one egg broke that day, and we all cheered the teams on as they managed to barely keep the eggs in tact.

Well, that was fun. What did I get out of it?

Ok, I just spent an entire day away from the work that was fresh in my head this morning. It’s Friday, so I’m about to leave for another 2 days and my work isn’t nearly where I wanted it to be by Monday. So now I’ll just be a day behind and have to end up making up time next week to be done by the final deadline. So why did I participate? What benefit did the company get out of me building this egg contraption?

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Every application out there is going to need some debugging. The question that comes to mind is what is the most effective approach to debugging the application you’re working on? There’s a number of ways to debug applications, and everyone has their own war stories on how they’ve figured out some of the most impossible things after digging in the trenches of code.

What I already know is what works for me. I’d like to know what works for everyone else in the same situations. I’ll explain how I’ve seen debugging in the past, and how I think the different methods should be applied.

Common debugging approaches

Here are some of the popular debugging approaches I’ve used and seen used for the most part in every environment I’ve worked in:

• Enable the debugger in your IDE and follow the application’s progress within the code – this particular approach allows you to see the actual flow of the application while it’s being run. You can take a look at the values of all your variables every step through the way and you can fast forward to any point in the code you want to see.
• Insert print statements into the code – this approach allows you to see what code the application is running through by watching the print output. You can see the flow, and print the values of variables onto the screen as they’re being used.
• Modify code and monitor data sources – this one’s a bit more time consuming so I won’t be highlighting it much in this post. Sometimes you simply need to see what your changes did by running the application and watching for changes in the database or in the files you’re working with.

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