September 2014 – Stephen Haunts { Coding in the Trenches }

Recently for a bit of fun I thought I would play around with Windows Presentation Foundation. I come from a Winforms background, but I never really got into WPF development as my programming career steered more towards WCF Services development.

For my simple project I thought I would write a simple little game. The game is a board game where the game resides in the main application window. What I wanted to have was another window that pops up and contains the games main menu, with options like ‘New Game’, ‘Exit’ etc.

When I added the code and Xaml to define the window, I noticed that the window still had a close icon on it. I wanted to get rid of this because I wanted access out of the menu to be controlled by the menu items in the centre of the screen. This was easy to do in Winforms as there was an option for it in the Visual Studio designer. Unfortunately this is not easily supported in WPF, but after a little digging I found the solution which required a little interop into user32.dll.

3 Ways Applicants Botch Their Employment Chances in a Job Interview

September 19, 2014 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

After posting articles on Preparing for a Job Interview by Myself, and Four Common Job Interview Questions (And How to Answer Them) by Michael Klazema I was contacted again my Michael and asked if I would like to post another guest article on recruitment tips. I was happy to post the article, and here it is.

There are a number of accepted ways to succeed in a job interview. Dressing in a nice, presentable fashion, being friendly, keeping eye contact with your interviewers, and providing concise and thoughtful answers to interview questions are all on the list. Unfortunately for all job searchers out there, for every tip toward a successful interview, there are probably a hundred different ways to fail. Some sure-fire interview blunders are common knowledge: showing up late, being rude to receptionists, or looking like a total slob are just a few behaviours that just about everyone knows will kill their employment chances.

3 Ways Applicants Botch Their Employment Chances in a Job Interview

However, there are also a few interview-killing behaviours that are a bit more subtle than arriving 10 minutes late, behavioural trends that are all too easy to fall into during an interview, and that can snap your employment chances before you even realize what you’ve done. Read on to learn about three of these interview missteps, as well as for tips on how you can avoid them.

Jokes

Friday Joke : I Hate Programming

September 19, 2014 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

I’ve not posted a Friday joke for a while, and I thought this one fitted the day I have been having very well..

Commentary/Pluralsight

Pluralsight Course Progress

September 7, 2014 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

It has been a while since I wrote anything about my new Pluralsight course that I am authoring, and someone asked me the other day how it was getting on, so I thought I would post an update. Things have been a little slow since I signed my authoring agreement. I signed the contract the day before I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Then when I got back I wrote my course proposal and got it signed off by a Content VP at Pluralsight. After that, I was away for another week before I properly met my new editor.

I have now met my Editor, done my training and have started producing the slides and material for the first module. Tonight I recorded the intro module for the course, edited it in Camtasia, and rendered a version ready to submit for my AV inspection. I am now full flow in producing the slides for the first course module.

Pluralsight Course Being Edited in Camtasia

As you can see from the picture above, my first course is called “Developer to Manager” and it is a course that helps developers choose whether going into a leadership role is right for them. The course also presents a 90 day transition plan to help people that have decided to make the move into management. This course is loosely based off of an article I wrote on the same subject earlier in the year, which has been a very popular article on this blog.

This is the start of the production journey for this course. It will be a lot of work, but I am looking forward to getting stuck in. I am aiming to try and get the course completed and submitted for the end of October.

Leadership

8 Leadership Traits for Software Development Leaders

September 5, 2014 Stephen Haunts 2 Comments

I was reading a good article the other day in INC magazine by Aaron Skonnard, who is the CEO of Pluralsight, who I have recently started Freelancing for. The article is called How to Build a Kick-Ass Exec Team, and talks about 8 leadership traits company heads / CEOs can use to create a good working culture within their organisations.

The article is aimed at people who run their own companies, but I thought the leadership traits Aaron talks about also apply to other leaders and managers lower in an organisation. From my point of view I am thinking as a Development Manager running a software team in a healthcare organisation.

8 Leadership Traits for Software Development Leaders

In this article I want to covers the original 8 leadership traits and say how they apply to managers and leaders of a software team in an organisation, as I feel there is a direct correlation. I recommend reading Aaron’s original article first.

Leaders Help Their Teams

The team I leade, I try to run agile using Scrum. I say, try, because the project I am currently running is part of a larger program of work that is very much waterfall. We are one of the donor projects in a larger agile transformation plan. As part of the running of this team I want to avoid being the guy at the top dishing out orders or even worse, Micro Managing. I believe a team should be self organising in their workload with inputs from the product owners and business who guide our direction. My role is very much about removing barriers and blockers that get in their way so they can concentrate on doing what they do best, developing software. I feel it is much better to be a servant leader as opposed to a more traditional autocratic leader who controls a strict hierarchy whilst leading from the top.

Commentary

Now on Twitter

September 3, 2014 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

I am now Tweeting more regularly on Twitter. I originally set up my Twitter account a number of years ago, but it kind of lapsed. Now this blog is starting to get popular, I decided to resurrect my account. It would be great if you are on Twitter, to hit the follow button.

AngularJS/JavaScript/Training

Training : AngularJS

September 3, 2014September 3, 2014 Stephen Haunts Leave a comment

In this article I have collated a few training links about Googles AngularJS Javascript Library. I will keep adding to this page as I find other useful free resources. If you have any videos or articles that you feel would be useful here then please let me know in the comments and I will add them to the post. I would like it to be an archive of good material.