An essay submitted as part of my application to the GreenFaith Fellowship Program. Hopefully I put my best foot forward ;-).
There are no clergy in the Bahá'í Faith. There is no seminary, and none can seek a position of leadership based on education, attainment, or station. Its governance is egalitarian and progressively inclusive. And yet it is inaccurate to say there are no leaders.
Basic was the first language I learned. Well, partially, in 8th grade. On Apple IIe at school and a Packard Bell 386 PC at home. A few years later, JavaScript came out and it became the first "modern" language I used. As an undergraduate physics major, I found it useful for quickly generating sample data or running some numerical approximations (simpler than Mathematica). Then I wrote a few web minor pages with DOM manipulation, before any of the modern frameworks had come out. I went to work, used it occasionally, but never had any excuses in work or home life to do more than dabble. The revolution was passing me by.
Developed to help introduce key topics in Test Driven Development, for new and veteran developers alike. Some examples are language-specific (C# / MSTest / Moq), but the principles apply to any object oriented language.
Stirring up a grassroots movement is hard work.
Dallas Interfaith Power & Light's steering committee has been working together for about two years now. We've held a number of workshops and dialogues on diverse topics, including: forming a green team, energy efficiency, solar, health impacts of climate change, the value of our park systems, the science of climate change, and more. Perhaps 100-150 people have attended, although our actual signed-in attendance count is 84 across all events.
"Learning to focus" © 2013, S. Fuqua / T. Homayoun. Ovenbird at Paradise Pond in Port Aransas, Texas.
As a "team lead" software engineer, I feel that an important part of my role is to ensure that the code is simple, but not necessarily easy. In fact, when I hear a developer say that "using this approach is easier," I have to fight the urge to lower my tail and growl menacingly.
Granted: code that only a senior developer, or worse yet only the author, understands is likewise unacceptable. Show me a piece of code that is too complex and abstruse, and we can have a conversation about (a) object oriented design theory and patterns, (b) refactoring to more self-explanatory methods, and (c) adding some appropriate formatting, comments and/or external documentation for blocks of code that are still unnerving. After all, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler," to (supposedly) quote Einstein – and frankly, general relativity is still hard to understand without significant study.
In the east, you have the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. In the west, there's the Black-Chinned Hummingbird. As with many other east/west divisions in both the animal and plant kingdoms, the two hummers sometimes overlap right here in Dallas county — for example, you can find both of them at Dogwood Canyon Audubon Center at Cedar Hill. Living in northwestern Dallas County, we did not know which to expect when we set out our feeder a few weeks ago. Thus far, it is has been entirely Black-Chinned.
Recently I have been looking at ServiceStack's OrmLite "Micro ORM" as a light-weight alternative to Entity Framework. It is relatively easy to use and very powerful, with capability for both code-first and database-first development. After learning the basic interaction, it was time to flip back into TDD-mode.
And then I found quite the challenge: I wanted to write unit tests that insure that I'm using OrmLite correctly. I was not interested (for the time being) in testing OrmLite's interaction with SQL Server itself. That is, I wanted behavioral unit tests rather than database integration tests. Time for a mock. But what would I mock? This ORM framework makes extensive use of extension methods that run off of the core IDbConnection interface from the .Net framework - so it would seem that there is no way to take advantage of Dependency Injection.
Last weekend, faith communities across the U.S. hosted more than two-hundred events aimed at expanding awareness of the reality of climate change. This was the National Preach-In on Climate Change, sponsored by Interfaith Power & Light. As Co-Chair of Dallas Interfaith Power & Light, I was excited and honored to be able to give a presentation to my own community (Bahá'ís of Irving) and to attend the innovative Preach-Off on Climate Change in Austin. The Bahá'í s of Austin also afforded me an opportunity to give my presentation on Moral Imperatives for Climate Action, from a Bahá'í Perspective, at their Sunday morning devotional program. Hopefully I was able to provide something useful to a few people; I certainly received much from my conversation and participation with people from many faith backgrounds. This will, God-willing, be the first of two blog posts reflecting on the conversations.
We got up this morning with merely grudging acceptance of the breakfast we planned on attending — an introduction to the Valley Ranch home owners association and committees, for new home owners. We left the meeting feeling excited and optimistic. We already knew that it was a good, "master planned," neighborhood. Now we feel more confident that it has a bright future as well, one that includes serious water conservation measures, ecological aesthetics, and social opportunities.
Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) is a great tool for building client/server applications in the .Net environment. It is one of those technologies that can be challenging to dig into when services are just one of many tools needed to assemble a business application, as opposed to being an end in itself. With some of my co-workers in mind, here are some of the lessons I have learned in using WCF for internal, line-of-business, applications. These notes, which will be published in several parts, assume a basic understanding of WCF and contracts.
