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Last week I encountered one of the more bizarre bugs of my career. Following the release, gaps started appearing on charts. The strange thing was that the data was all in the database; it just wasn’t coming through the user interface. Unfortunately, for this release, rolling back wasn’t really an option, so we needed to [...]

Inspired by Eric Ries’ SEM on five dollars a day article, I decided to set up a little AdWords campaign for our Earth Hour event. The campaign was a bit of an experiment as we hadn’t advertised using AdWords before and weren’t too sure what to expect. Overall, I was hugely impressed – the ad [...]

Earth Hour is a big event for my company, Pulse Energy. We are monitoring the energy savings for a variety of sites around Vancouver. This is our second year participating in Earth Hour and our first year as WWF partner for the Canadian Earth Hour campaign. Last year was pretty hectic, but it was a [...]

Last week, I conducted a tutorial on Continuous Monitoring at the Agile 2008 conference in Toronto. The title of the session is Continuous Monitoring: Beyond Continuous Integration. Unfortunately, the track organizers changed the topic title on me twice and as a result I ended up with a number of attendees who had come to learn [...]

While at DevTeach, I was interviewed by Scott Hanselman for his Hanselminutes Podcast. We started out talking about the history of the CruiseControl.NET project, but I opted to segue into discussing Continuous Monitoring. Continuous Monitoring focuses on providing continuous feedback to a team by leveraging visible dashboard displays to ambiently communicate information about the health [...]

Last week I was out in Toronto presenting at DevTeach. I gave 3 presentations: Database Migration in .NET (Sample Code) Recommended CI Practices Operations Database: Bridging the Gap between Development and Production Unfortunately I ended up attending relatively few of the sessions as I was pretty busy preparing the materials for my presentations. But what [...]

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At 8pm Saturday March 29th, people around the world turned out the lights in support of Earth Hour. Earth Hour is a campaign organized by the WWF to raise awareness of the connection between energy use and global climate change. The event encourages people to take action by turning off their lights and power to [...]

Now that I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a little over a month, I have some additional observations on its merits and demerits. Overall, I’m still extremely happy with the product and consider it to be the best laptop I’ve owned to-date. I still do quite a bit of work in Windows (both development and [...]

I have been selected as a speaker at the Toronto DevTeach event on May 12-16th. I’m running 3 session: Automated Database Evolution and Deployment Recommended practices for Continuous Integration Home-grown Production System Monitoring and Report Let me know if you’re planning to attend the event and if there’s anything in particular that you would like [...]