I’m taking some time off, starting tomorrow. I’ll be out all next week. That means that you’ll have to look elsewhere for your daily dose of Morning Coffee. I do have a few posts I’ve been holding back to auto post next week, so you don’t have to go completely DevHawk free. But if something big happens next week, don’t expect any immediate reaction from me.

In addition to various technical blogs, I read a variety of political blogs. Not sure why, but where most of the technical blogs I read are individual voices, political blogs seem to be more group efforts. And even on the individual political blogs, they still have guest posters that come in periodically and when the primary blog owner is on vacation. Since I’ve gotten into the habit of posting every day, I decided I’d try out a guest poster. So in addition to a few auto posted entries, my teammate Dale Churchward will be holding down the fort here at DevHawk in my absence. I’ve linked to Dale’s blog Half My Brain on many occasions, so you should have a passing familiarity with him.

One of the interesting things about having Dale posting here is how different he and I are. I’m a developer at heart but he’s an sysadmin at heart. I code, he scripts. I worry about developer productivity, he worries about management and operations. He carried a pager for ten years, I didn’t. I’m a Democrat and he’s <gasp> a Republican! (At least he’s not a Penguins fan.)

Seriously, one of the things that is great about working with Dale is the vast difference in experience. He’s forgotten more about management and operations than I know (though I am a fast learner) so we make a very good team. Have a good week and be nice to Dale while I’m gone.

• As 24 sputters, Lost hits it’s stride. Last nights episode rocked.
• My old team keeps churning out great stuff. This time, it’s the new Composite Applications site.
• In a follow up to a post from a couple of weeks ago, Joe McKendrick declares that “Rogue IT is Cool“. In the spirit of rogueness, maybe we get the Rogue Ale guys to whip up some IT themed beers? Service Oriented Stout? Architecture Ale? Programmer’s Porter? (you get the idea)
• Scott Hanselman provides a detailed look at static analysis in general and NDepend in particular. I hereby coin the acronym YAGTSR, which stands for “Yet Another Great Tool Scott Recommends”.
• Jeff Atwood thinks we should code smaller. He lists some positive aspects of small code (less bugs, less chance of failure, etc) and links to Bob Koss talking about the negative aspects of big code (harder to understand, harder to reuse, higher likelihood of duplication, etc). OK, I’m down, but where’s the how? I’ve got fairly radical ideas on this subject: regularly throw out your old code and start over. In movie making, there’s this idea that you have to “kill your babies“. Not literally of course, they’re talking about having the willingness to scrap your pet idea, favorite line, coolest shot, etc. for the sake of the bigger picture. I think the same goes for making software.