Practical Hypermedia for our post ORM world

This post is for people who have started learning about hypermedia and feel that it over complicates the elegance of REST. When I started hearing about hypermedia I felt it was adding architecture acrobatics for the sake of buzzword enhancement. After having applied these techniques in a few places not only have a drunk the cool aid, I’ve setup a stand beside my desk. I look back and try to understand where my initial negative reaction came from....

September 29, 2012 · 8 min · Aaron Held

Embracing change

It’s a month past due so here is my obligatory “I changed my job” post. Over the last nearly 8 years at Comcast as part of the ‘Online’ group and later as founding member of mighty Comcast Interactive Media I’ve made many business connections, met a number of excellent peers and forged a few relationships that will last a lifetime. As a happily married 40+ dad with mortgage and college payments I often feel over the hill with regards to blogging and living out loud....

March 3, 2012 · 5 min · Aaron Held

Using python-dulwich to load any version of a file from a local git repo

On Monday we are kicking off an innovation week (more to come on that topic) and I’ve devised a little project that includes nearly every buzzword I’m interested in. I’m spending some time doing some technical spikes to see what is possible and I found a need to load a particular file from a git repo given the path and tree hash. I grabbed my trusty python, dulwich (native python-git library) and gave it a shot....

April 2, 2011 · 1 min · Aaron Held

the measure of Awesome

Development at work has been trending well in the new year and the team is getting excited about our formal incorporation of practices such as TDD and pair programming. I’m definitely perceive an intangible benefit in culture and fun. With a full test suite and engaged developers working out loud coding is fun again. I give a lot of thought to developer efficiency and generating metrics around our output is very important to me....

January 23, 2011 · 2 min · Aaron Held

Jugaad - India's Agile style

I’ve been reading about India’s concept of Jugaad, possibly poised to enter our buzzword vocabulary since it came up in the context of what Obama can learn from that country. Where the Agile Manifesto starts with “Individuals and Interactions” the Harvard Business Review kicks off Jugaad with “Thrift not Waste”. All too often I’ve seen Agile work because a scarcity of resources (money, time or knowledge) pushed an otherwise waterfall loving group into giving Agile a shot....

November 14, 2010 · 2 min · Aaron Held