Thoughts from a Thirsty Bear

Bill Gates chose to open his 2013 TED talk with the words  "Everyone needs a coach" . Someone to provide feedback, and help them see how others see them. True enough - I have helped many people over the years understand themselves, how they interact with others, and how they can resolve inner conflicts and improve. For me, being an effective personal coach is one part of providing quality leadership to companies, and was one reason I went on the Barefoot coaching course a while back. But let's zoom out, and look at the next level in the software industry, specifically the delivery teams. These folks should be the powerhouse of any company, turning customer needs and ideas into reality that can be assessed for usefulness, and ultimately value (whatever that is - value can take many forms. Maybe a subject to explore another day).  However, in companies I work with I am seeing a problem with many of these powerhouses. Something that I suspect is rapidly becoming a  BIG prob

Back in 2009, a fine developer for Los Techies produced a set of mocked up motivational posters representing the SOLID principles . She was even kind enough to release them under a Creative Commons license. But as is the way of all things, internet rust has set in and the images have been unlinked from the original article during an archive exercise - but they live on throughout the internet! I have collected the images here - and would like to say " Thank you, River Lynn Bailey ". This is a great, amusing and educational resource for everyone.

Following a fairly public spat and veiled threats over trademarks by Oracle, the Hudson CI server has been renamed to Jenkins . OK, technically Jenkins is a branch of the Hudson code, so it's more like Hudkins or Jenson . Oracle (sorry, " the Java community ") will continue to develop the Hudson trunk, however the branch appears to have the blessing of the core Hudson Jenkins development team and the community (the vote to fork appears to have been virtually unanimous ). If it looks like a duck & quacks like a duck....then the parent might just start resembling a dodo . I'd like to wish the Jenkins team good luck. I've used Hudson to great effect many times, and look forward to the future improvements with the new project butler.

This is documented elsewhere, but here it is again: The problem - you want to test a web site where you get a popup to accept an unrecognised certificate, eg when using a self-generated certifictate. Selenium cannot click on the resulting confirmation window, but worse still Selenium does not store your decision even though you have selected 'permanently accept' manually the first time. The solution - basically Selenium is launching a clean copy of the browser each time. So you need to create a persistent profile to use each time. As far as I know this is only possible with Firefox. Create a new Firefox profile (firefox.exe -profileManager). In this case the name of the new profile is selenium-https-profile Add the certificate to it Add a suitable .pac to redirect to the SeleniumServer function FindProxyForURL(url, host) { if(shExpMatch(url, '*/selenium-server/*')) { return 'PROXY localhost:4444; DIRECT'; } } Start the server ja