This past Friday I finally completed the "public expression" portion of the eco-theology project for the GreenFaith Fellowship. The presentation is accessible at GreenBahai.com. It addresses the following topics from an multi-faith perspective:

• Highlight key themes in religious responses to climate change:
  • Love of Creation
  • Urgency
  • Love and Compassion
  • Justice
  • Oneness and Interdependence
• Call to Action — statements and declarations
  • Prevention
  • International Action
  • Awareness and Advocacy
  • Taking Action

I've spent the weekend preparing a presentation on the Call to Action on Climate Change, which I'll be giving at the Bahá'í Center of Irving on this coming Friday evening.

Joining so many others in the worldwide faith communities, I am overjoyed at the Pope's encyclical Laudato Si, which came out officially just a few days ago. Although I will not be saying much about it, it is a large part of the inspiration for the up-coming presentation. And I would like to share the heart-achingly beautiful second paragraph:

This sister now cries out to us because of the harm we have inflicted on her by our irresponsible use and abuse of the goods with which God has endowed her. We have come to see ourselves as her lords and masters, entitled to plunder her at will. The violence present in our hearts, wounded by sin, is also reflected in the symptoms of sickness evident in the soil, in the water, in the air and in all forms of life. This is why the earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor; she "groans in travail" (Rom 8:22). We have forgotten that we ourselves are dust of the earth (cf. Gen 2:7); our very bodies are made up of her elements, we breathe her air and we receive life and refreshment from her waters.

The news has been going around: "refactoring doesn't work," say researchers. Code quality does not improve. It isn't worth the time and effort. Here's why I don't buy it — why the research is fundamentally flawed and real software groups should ignore it.

Does Visual Studio Code measure up to its close kin, Atom?

A friend asked me what I thought of Code. When I installed it a few weeks ago, my first reaction was: this is nice, if you're not used to Atom already. Never satisfied with a simple gut reaction, I thought for a moment, and realized that I had not looked closely at Microsoft's additions – particularly, debugging.

A disturbing thing happened at Earth Day Texas - racists and nativists showed up masquerading as environmentalists. A tweet from the Southern Poverty Law Center alerted me that anti-immigrant groups with white supremacist ties would be out at Earth Day Texas. Seeing one of their (unmanned) booths was, therefore, not a surprise. But being verbally accosted at my own booth was.

Last night we turned off the lights early for Earth Hour, and went outside for a good long walk through the neighborhood and on the nearby Campion Trail.

The photo at right is nearly three years old, and represents one of the last good long night walks I had taken - that time at the beach in Port Aransas. While walking in Irving, TX is nowhere near as nice as walking the beach, it was still delightful. We saw no fireflies - too early, if they're out there. We saw and heard no owls, as I had hoped. But the tree shadows from a bright half-moon, overcoming the city glow, was magical in itself. This suburban dweller, overcome by too many street lights, had forgotten about the beauty of moon shadows.

"Project T" is a temporary codename for a web application that I have begun developing off hours. Having just read The Phoenix Project, and now reading Continuous Delivery, I realized that the first step in creating a minimum viable product is to have a minimum viable process for continuous delivery, with no financial budget for that process. The solution combines a Microsoft Azure VM, GitHub, TeamCity, NuGet, Bower, Grunt, MSDeploy, and SoapUI. The result is this: as soon as I commit code to the version control system, it starts an automated chain reaction that ends with a complete install on my integration test servers.

A lightweight performance test harness for Windows console apps: PerfTestHarness on GitHub. Includes some fun use of C# 6 property initializers, string interpolation, nameof(), and expression bodied functions.

I've been misunderstanding .NET's List<T> for years.

Two incidents this week have driven home the value of being able to study the source code of frameworks I code with. One the one hand, I was using NServiceKit.OrmLite for database access, and needed to understand how it constructs its SQL. Through study of the code, I was able to find and remediate a limitation in the wildcard handling*.

Last year I read Jurgen Appelo's Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders. Despite taking many useful notes, I did not have the time to write up a full review / collect my thoughts on it. Overall impression: this books has tremendous value, and I recommend it highly to anyone in IT management / leadership (whether operations or software).

I look forward to re-reading it in the near future. For now, I will satisfy myself by re-collecting and re-pondering a few of those notes, starting with the topics of Knowledge and Diversity (from Ch 4 - The Information-Innovation System)