Running Version 2

I finished my 10 week running plan over a month ago. I've been slacking since then, but today I'm going to pick it up again. I'm going to start training for that 5K I have to run at some point this year. My 10 week plan worked out great. It wasn't too hard, I had more mental issues than physical. Here is the plan for the next 6 weeks:

Week	M	T	W	H	F	S	S	Total
1		2		2		2		6
2		2.5		2.5		2.5		7.5
3		3		3		2.5	2	10.5
4		3.5		3.5		3	2	12
5		4	2	3.5		3.5	2	15
6		4		2		2		8

Book Review: Inside Intuit

This book is one of the most fascinating, intriguing, and entertaining books I've ever read. Every entrepreneur should get a copy of this book. Intuit went through all of the stages a startup company might imagine including an epic battle with Microsoft. Software developers will love all of the great stories about the challenges and hard work that it took to make Quicken and the other Intuit products so successful. Service oriented companies will love to hear about how this company truly valued their customer's and their feedback. Management will love to hear how they acquired companies, raised money, and were almost acquired by Microsoft. A truly amazing story about a startup who beat all odds.

Why Code Reviews Are So Important

Yesterday I spent five hours participating in a hard core code review / bug fix session. The code we were reviewing was rather small, but there were a lot of cases to test. Code reviews can be structured in many different ways, but we took the following approach:

1. Review the functional specification to understand the goals of the project
2. Run a few preliminary test cases to make sure the product met the goals
3. Compare every screen to the designs to make sure they were 100% correct (right fonts, colors, wording)
4. Fix bugs on the spot. This was the most time consuming part, but I'm glad we did this right away, avoiding having to hold another session the following day.
5. This project was primarily modifying existing code to add additional functionality. This means that we can use trac in combination with svn to review only the changes made to each file. This makes the code review process very thorough and very fast. Trac does a great job color coding differences and we were able to find a dozen or so typos and bugs simply from looking at the trac diffs. We fixed the bugs right away, committed the code, and repeated the process.
6. After we finished fixing all of the bugs we went through a more thorough testing of the entire application to make sure we didn't break anything and that all of the bugs discovered were indeed fixed.

Overall I was very pleased with the results. The code review not only produced many bug fixes, but it emphasizes the importance of good coding, documenting your code, and being able to work with others.