In order to not steal any thunder from the post, the title along details my sentiments about why so many people miss the mark on truly achieving their dreams. If you have not yet started reading his blog, Tim Ferris shares a lot of his own personal experiments with lifestyle tweaks that allow him to live a much "richer" life than most will ever experience.

None of this is out of your reach, and everyone has their own definition of what living a rich life means to them. If you can't say that you are currently living the life you dreamed about, only you can do something about it. I had to ask for God's guidance and be obedient to His direction, as well as take risks that seemed impossible to me to start truly living the life that my wife and I dreamed about when we first got married 12 years ago.

Please take the time to read the post titled Why Bigger Goals = Less Competition, and subscribe to the blog already!!

For those of you who are tuned to this blog hoping to see more technical content, you are going to have to be more patient. As currently I am much more focused on empowering people with respect to their thinking on how to "achieve childhood dreams".

Live and Develop With Passion!!

My family and I are big proponents of lifestyle design. I was unfamiliar with the term until I started reading the great blog of Mr. Tim Ferris.

I posted a while ago about how the Lord had prompted us to give away all of our material possessions!! Save for a few bags of clothing and some irreplaceable childhood mementos of the kids, we are officially a 100% mobile family.

For the last 2 years my family and I have been doing a lot of traveling. For the other 10 years of our marriage we did zero!! This has been a large and much welcomed change for us, and it was one of the items that we had on our original "big dream list".

Unfortunately, a large majority of the travel consisted of business related trips that left me with little time to enjoy the places that we were all visiting. My wife and I decided early on in our marriage that we would always make a commitment to travel as a family. I can count on one hand the number of times in my entire career that I have ever had to travel without my family, and all of those times were due to circumstances that were beyond our control. So though we have been traveling as a family, I can't say that I have been able to enjoy the locations as much as they have, thankfully this has been improving over the last couple of trips and is about to undertake a major overhaul!!

My wife and I have always felt the same about enjoying life one day at a time, and not just waiting for the good stuff when I get to "retirement". We want our kids to see that the world is a phenomenal place with lots of little adventures that can be taken all the time. To that end, tomorrow my family and I will be the leaving our "comfort zone" of a stable home and known environment, to hit the open road and travel the world for the next 6 months - 1 year!! We have several key places that we want to hit on our journey, but we are keeping our options open and letting the Lord direct us in the location he wants us to go.

I feel confident that all of the traveling we have been doing these past 2 years was to prepare us for this time. We are looking forward to be able to grow even stronger as a family unit, while also trusting in the Lord to help us meet our needs as we go about our travels. Initially we thought that Austin was the place that we were going to end up. At this time, we do not feel that it is the place. We want to use this journey as an opportunity for us to see new places, meet new people, and be a blessing to anyone the Lord puts in our path along our travels. As well, as potentially open our eyes to a place that we can eventually establish roots in.

What about work? I decided to bite the bullet and offer my current client the ability for me to work remotely in lieu of several months of consulting fees. They are a startup company with a potentially awesome product that just needs some time to grow their legs. I have a vested interest in seeing this thing succeed, so I will continue to do my part in a completely remote fashion. I have been working on my own for the last year and am hoping to conclude this project by the end of the year so that when we have completed our travels, I will be able to reconnect with a team that is in need of an extra developer!! This means that I am purposefully taking a hit so that I can enjoy the experience of being on the open road. There will only be a month in the next 6 months that will be a pure vacation month. The rest of my schedule should look as follows:

• 5:30AM - Wake up and work out
• 7:30AM - Start work, complete one of my most important tasks of the day
• 11:00AM - Check email once
• 11:20AM - Lunch
• 11:50AM - 2:30PM - Complete work day

At 2:30PM each day I will connect with my family and we will explore whatever location we happen to be in. I am working on a condensed schedule, as an emphasis on lifestyle design draws me away from the typical 9-5 schedule. It may take me a little longer to get my responsibilities completed, but the journey will be so much more rewarding!!

Of course, I am keeping myself open to the option of being able to work with other teams in an ad-hoc nature as we progress through our travels. Which reminds me!! In the end of October timeframe, if you happen to know of a company that would be willing to have a good remote resource available at a steal of a rate, get in contact with me!!

So far, the places that we know we are visiting are as follows:

• Vancouver
• San Francisco
• San Diego
• Panama City Beach
• Orlando
• Domican Repuplic
• England
• Dusseldorf, Germany
• Paris,France
• Las Vegas

Places that we would also like to visit during this time:

• Greece
• Turks and Caicos
• Scotland
• Rome

We head out tomorrow in the family van, and will be driving as much as we can while we are in the US and Canada. While in Europe we are going to try to exercise the train infrastructure as much as possible.

At this point we actually have no idea where our travels will ultimately take us, but we are all approaching this trip with a great deal of anticipation.

What is my point to all of this? 3 years ago I would not have dreamed of orchestrating this kind of endeavor. Where I am sitting today, I understand the importance of taking the time to live "now". In the last couple of months, our family goals have once again shifted, and my wife and I are once again "dreaming big" to see where we want to take our family. If we were not willing to "give it all up" in pursuit of a bigger dream that we all share as a family, we would easily be able to sink into a comfortable, known, safe lifestyle that would not really challenge us as a family. I have done it before on my blog and I am going to do it again now. Read the following books/resources:

• The Dream Giver
• The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People
• Tim Ferris
• The Purpose Driven Life
• The Greatness Guide
• The Prayer of Jabez

After reading through the above resources ask yourself the following questions:

• What do I really want to achieve out of life?
• What legacy do I want to leave for my kids?
• What legacy do I want to leave for others?
• What am I currently trying to handle that I should be forgetting about completely?
• What am I currently holding onto that could potentially hinder me from achieving my goals?
• What are my goals?
• How can I start truly "living" today?

Answering the questions above could be the start of a new path for your entire life. You have to be able to embrace the unknown with courage, remembering as the Prayer Of Jabez says, in the places you feel the most uncomfortable, is where the potential for growth is the greatest!!

Live and Develop With Passion!!!

Having downloaded and started to use Rhino Mocks 3.5 beta pretty much as soon as Oren released. I am very happy with the AAA style (Arrange, Act, Assert) and the readability and brevity it has brought to my tests. The current project I am on has a huge set of tests. Here is an example of using Rhino Mocks, in conjunction with some BDD style naming:

    [Concern(typeof (UnitOfWorkFactory))]
    public class When_a_new_unit_of_work_is_requested_to_be_created : behaves_like_unit_of_work_with_scope_storage_in_play
    {
        protected override void because()
        {
            sut.Create();
        } 

        [Observation]
        public void Should_access_scoped_storage_to_determine_if_a_unit_of_work_is_already_active()
        {
            scoped_storage.was_told_to(item => item.DoesNotContain<IUnitOfWork>());
        }
    }

    [Concern(typeof (UnitOfWorkFactory))]
    public class When_creating_a_unit_of_work_and_the_scoped_storage_does_not_contain_an_active_unit_of_work : behaves_like_unit_of_work_with_scope_storage_in_play
    {
        private ISession session;

        protected override void establish_context()
        {
            base.establish_context();
            session = Dependency<ISession>();
            scoped_storage.setup_result(item => item.DoesNotContain<IUnitOfWork>()).Return(true);
            nhibernate_session_factory.setup_result(item => item.OpenSession()).Return(session);
        }

        protected override void because()
        {
            sut.Create();
        }

        [Observation]
        public void Should_store_the_newly_created_unit_of_work_in_scoped_storage()
        {
            scoped_storage.was_told_to(item => item.Store(Arg<IUnitOfWork>.Matches(uow => uow != null)));
        }
    }

    [Concern(typeof (UnitOfWorkFactory))]
    public class When_a_new_unit_of_work_is_requested_and_one_already_exists_in_scoped_storage : behaves_like_unit_of_work_with_scope_storage_in_play
    {
        private ISession session;
        private IUnitOfWork new_unit_of_work;
        private IUnitOfWork active_unit_of_work;

        protected override void establish_context()
        {
            base.establish_context();
            session = Dependency<ISession>();
            active_unit_of_work = Dependency<IUnitOfWork>();
            nhibernate_session_factory.setup_result(item => item.OpenSession()).Return(session);
            scoped_storage.setup_result(item => item.Contains<IUnitOfWork>()).Return(true);
            scoped_storage.setup_result(item => item.Retrieve<IUnitOfWork>()).Return(active_unit_of_work);
        }

        protected override void because()
        {
            new_unit_of_work = sut.Create();
        }

        [Observation]
        public void Should_return_a_non_disposing_unit_of_work_proxy()
        {
            new_unit_of_work.should_be_an_instance_of<NonDisposableUnitOfWork>();
        }
    }
 

I am no longer using the automocking container so you are probably wondering what the Dependency method call is all about. It is simply a method defined on a base ContextSpecification class whose definition is as follows:

    [Context]
    public abstract class ContextSpecification
    {
        [SetUp]
        public void setup()
        {
            unit_test_container.Initialize();
            establish_context();
            because();
        }

        [TearDown]
        public void teardown()
        {
            after_each_specification();
            unit_test_container.tear_down_and_unregister_from_dependency_registry();
        }

        protected abstract void because();
        protected abstract void establish_context();

        protected virtual void after_each_specification()
        {
        }

        protected InterfaceType Dependency<InterfaceType>()
        {
            return MockRepository.GenerateMock<InterfaceType>();
        }

        protected InterfaceType Stub<InterfaceType>()
        {
            return MockRepository.GenerateStub<InterfaceType>();
        }
    }

And I have some extension methods that wrap the RhinoMocks "assertions" with more language oriented assertions: Instead of AssertWasCalled you get was_told_to, and so on.

Develop With Passion!!

Every morning for the last week I have been subscribed to the Daily Success devotional program. When I check my email in the morning one of the messages that I read is a devotional that gives me some words of scripture that I can try to memorize and start applying to my daily life. The topic that was discussed this morning has been one that seems to be popping up a lot in close circles for me right now. So I thought I would take the time to share the story with everyone:

"One day the president of a successful real estate company stood before his sales staff of about one hundred. After presenting several new properties, he stated, “My success story has been written up in a national business magazine. If you would like a copy, just see my secretary.”

A lightning bolt of dismay and tension struck the staff. Angry looks were exchanged, and murmuring began: “Who does he think he is?! We are the ones that made this company successful! It is our success story, not his.”

That very afternoon, several of his top salesmen quit and formed their own company. Soon there was not enough money to close contracts, so the president used money from other escrow accounts, which is a federal offense. Within six months, the once-successful company was dissolved, and the president began serving a prison sentence, all because of the lack of one character quality—humility.

“By humility and the fear of the LORD are riches, and honour, and life” (Proverbs 22:4).

Pride is the sin that God hates the most and punishes the swiftest. Pride caused Satan and a third of the angels to be cast out of heaven. Pride was the cause of Adam and Eve’s dismissal from the Garden of Eden. It is also the cause of our unrepentance over sin, which keeps God from blessing us with riches, honor, and life. “Pride, and arrogancy, and the evil way … do I hate” (Proverbs 8:13). God resists the proud and so do people. That is why conflicts are stirred up, because “only by pride cometh contention” (Proverbs 13:10).

Pride is putting ourselves on an equal level with God. It is reserving for ourselves the right to decide what is right or wrong. Our pride is what put Jesus on the cross. We are just like those who said, “We will not have this man reign over us.”

Pride is projecting on the outside what is not true on the inside. Today, let’s conquer this primary hindrance to daily success by humbling ourselves before a holy God and making things right with all those whom we have offended."

I encourage you to take the time to read the information on the Daily Success site to see if there is information that you could benefit from.

Develop With Passion!!

Thanks to the attentive eye of Phil Haselden I have recently changed the date of the October edition of Nothin But .Net so that it no longer conflicts with Microsoft PDC.

The course will now run the week prior to PDC (20th - 24th).

Develop With Passion!!

If you are looking for a great in depth dissection of the C# language and in particular C# 3.0 this is an absolute must read. Jon has a demonstrated mastery of the C# language and used this knowledge to disseminate lots of practical pragmatic tips with respect to leveraging C# in your application development.

Jon will take you under the hood of features ranging from generics all the way the expression trees!!

At just over 390 pages, if you devour books, you will be able to work through this one very quickly and be able to start applying a majority of the concepts to help improve the way that you build applications with the .Net framework.

If you know of someone who needs an advanced brush up on their C# skills, I would highly recommend this book as something that they should read!!

Develop With Passion!!

It is the season of graduation and everywhere I look I can see starry eyed teenagers gazing at the big, uncertain, exciting path that is ahead of them. Their dreams are whirling full tilt through their heads and they have a blank slate with which to carve out the rest of their lives.

I love this time of year. It reminds me of why I continue to do what I do.

Each day we wake up in the morning with a choice as to how we are going to live out our day. I choose to thank God for the opportunity of the new day and focus my energies on building up my family and fostering the passions of other developers that I work with.

In the spirit of fostering the passion of other developers jpboodhoo.com is issuing a contest.  The contest will have 3 winners.

The first prize will be........:

1 Free Admission into the October Las Vegas edition of my Nothin But .Net developer bootcamp, where you will receive the following:

• Understanding of core fundamental software principles and patterns
• Understanding of Behavior driven development
• Practice utilizing advanced techniques for building .Net applications
• ReSharper 4.0 License
• $70 Amazon credit
• Breakfast, lunch , and supper for the week in one of many amazing Las Vegas restaurants.
• Renewed passion towards your craft!!

• The first prize winner will also receive a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite and MSDN Premium one year subscription.

The second prize is nothing to scoff at either, as the recipient of the second prize will receive the following set of books and developer tools:

• Books
• Tools
• Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite with MSDN Premium One Year Subscription

The third prize is:  A $140 Amazon Gift Card

So there are the prizes!!

How do you go about getting your hands on one of these awesome giveaways? The premise of the contest is very simple. I want you to submit a story that shares your experience of how you are having an impact on the personal and professional lives of the people you work with. I want to hear how you are using the gifts you have been given to inspire and build up other people that you work/collaborate with. I want to hear about how you are able to energize and motivate the people that you work with to make them want to strive to be both better people and developers in general!!

The rules for the contest are fairly simple:

• This one goes without saying, the stories have to be true. If you need to change the names of people because they prefer/have to remain anonymous, that is no problem!!
• The story has to be something you are willing for everyone to read as the top 5 entries will be posted on this blog for further voting (more on this in a minute).
• All stories need to be submitted in English.
• The stories need to be at least 2 large paragraphs long.
• Maximum of one entry per person.
• All entries have to be submitted by the 24th of June 2008.
• Must be working full time as a software professional (not a student).

• Submit your stories to contests@jpboodhoo.com, only stories submitted to this email address will be considered.

How the winners will be chosen

Myself and a team of people will be reading through the responses and picking the top 5 stories that we can come to a consensus on. Upon selecting the top 5 stories, all 5 of the stories will be posted in a blog post that will allow the general public to vote on the story that is their favorite. The 5 stories will be filtered down to the top 3 that will decide who gets what prizes!!

The timeline for the contest is as follows:

• Submission deadline : June 24th
• Blog post of top 5 entries & voting by general public: July 2nd - July 9th
• Winners Announced: July 10th (exactly one month from today)

If you are someone who feels they have a story to share, or you know of others who have stories that others would benefit from hearing, please direct them to this contest!!

Develop With Passion!!

After a fun filled day of goofing around and running up and down the mall with my family we caught the 7PM Imax showing of Kung Fu Panda!!

Once again, I was blown away by the quality of the animation that Dreamworks manages to put together. The visuals are truly dazzling. I am not going to spoil the movie for anyone, but the movie is brilliant. If it can keep our 2 year old engaged for over one and a half hours then it has our vote!!

The voice acting is truly awesome, and Jack Black is the perfect person they could have chosen to play the hilarious Po. My wife and I burst out laughing together several times during the movie!!

If you are looking for a feel good family flick, then check out Kung Fu Panda as soon as you can!!

Next week I am going to be issuing a contest that anyone who reads my blog will have the opportunity to participate in. Start spreading the word and tell your friends to keep an eye out, as the prizes are awesome!!

Develop With Passion

Just got an email from a man named Michael Hunger. It looks like he has been busy compiling and creating resources focused around the arena of "Creating Passionate Developers". I have not had a lot of time to look at the information, but I am developing 100% behind the message!!

Check out the following resources:

• Michael's Web Site
• Creating Passionate Developers

Develop With Passion!!

If you have been on the fence, now is the time to truly jump onto the ground and start running again in VS!!

ReSharper 4.0 RC is now available!!

I cannot stress enough the awesomeness that is this tool!! It has gotten to the point (I was there a long time ago) where I will not code at a machine that does not have ReSharper installed. It becomes a deal breaker for me with new clients that I engage if they are not willing to install ReSharper on the client machines (of course, there is the old ask for forgiveness, not permission route for this one also!!).

If you are still coding in Visual Studio using Raw Visual Studio then all I can say is that ignorance has to be bliss, as you truly cannot comprehend the productivity enhancements that can come once you have a truly powerful editor in your hands. For me the sweet spot seems to be ReSharper + VIEmu.

If you happen to be a user group leader/attendee and want to see what ReSharper can really do when opened up full tilt, get in contact with me and I would be happy to come and give a live coding demo!! Or you could just check out a session of the tool in action recorded by ReSharper Jedi Master : Ilya Ryzhenkov.

Are you ready to walk the path of the ReSharper Jedi??

Develop With Passion!!

Seeing as how my daily work ritual for the last couple of months has been to startup my machine and pull down and install the latest version of ReSharper, I found it pleasantly surprising to see the addition to the install dialog this morning:

Tools Matter!! I could not agree more!!

Develop With Passion!!

This post is in direct reference to the brilliant paper titled "The Humble Programmer" written by the software genius Edsger Dijkstra.

If you take the time to read this paper, keep in mind that it was originally published in 1972!! Here are 2 (of the many) that resound very strongly with me:

"But one should not first make the program and then prove its correctness, because then the requirement of providing the proof would only increase the poor programmer's burden. On the contrary: the programmer should let correctness proof and program grow hand in hand. Argument three is essentially based on the following observation. If one first asks oneself what the structure of a convincing proof would be and, having found this, then constructs a program satisfying this proof's requirements, then these correctness concerns turn out to be a very effective heuristic guidance. By definition this approach is only applicable when we restrict ourselves to intellectually manageable programs, but it provides us with effective means for finding a satisfactory one among these."

If that section in bold does not scream TDD to you, then I don't know what will!!

Another good section talking about languages and how we can abuse them is here:

"The competent programmer is fully aware of the strictly limited size of his own skull; therefore he approaches the programming task in full humility, and among other things he avoids clever tricks like the plague. In the case of a well-known conversational programming language I have been told from various sides that as soon as a programming community is equipped with a terminal for it, a specific phenomenon occurs that even has a well-established name: it is called "the one-liners". It takes one of two different forms: one programmer places a one-line program on the desk of another and either he proudly tells what it does and adds the question "Can you code this in less symbols?" —as if this were of any conceptual relevance!— or he just asks "Guess what it does!". From this observation we must conclude that this language as a tool is an open invitation for clever tricks; and while exactly this may be the explanation for some of its appeal, viz. to those who like to show how clever they are, I am sorry, but I must regard this as one of the most damning things that can be said about a programming language"

And finally he shares a piece of advice that is awesome:

"We shall do a much better programming job, provided that we approach the task with a full appreciation of its tremendous difficulty, provided that we stick to modest and elegant programming languages, provided that we respect the intrinsic limitations of the human mind and approach the task as Very Humble Programmers"

Brilliant advice from an equally brilliant man!!

Develop With Passion

Was just listening to one of my favorite Newsboys songs this morning and I thought I would share some of the lyrics:

Stay strong
You are not lost
Come on and fix your eyes ahead
There's a new dawn to light our day, our day
We've gotta stay strong
You and I run
For the prize that lies ahead
We've come too far to lose our way, our way

Get up, there's further to go
Get up, there's more to be done
Get up, this witness is sure
Get up, this race can be won
This race can be won

Good Advice if you ask me!!

Develop With Passion!!