Recent Entries

Happy Birthday - Ahmed Rasheed

Last weekend was a memorable day for our small family. It was the first birthday of our cute little son "Ahmed Rasheed" who was born on July, 12th last year. I am sure those of you with a kid in the house will be in agreement to the excitement and happiness that surround this great milestone.

Time really flies very quickly as it just seem like yesterday when we brought Ahmed from hospital and probably for the first time in my life, I was feeling very nervous while driving. Anyways we are thankful for such a great gift and wish him a great and prosperous future.

CFLog4j - Interesting enhancements by Eric

I wrote cflog4j last year while working with an application at work that needed significant amount of logging. CFLog4j is essentially a ColdFusion based wrapper around the powerful Java library for logging i.e. log4j. I also wrote few Fusebox lexicons to log activity from the circuit files as that was the framework of choice at my last job. I haven't had a chance to improve and extend the original code for a while now. However Eric Knipp has been doing some excellent work with this project. Here are few blog posts related to this topic.

  1. ColdFusion and Log4j
  2. ColdFusion & Log4j Part 2 - Writing Logs to a Database
  3. ColdFusion & Log4j Part 3 - Custom Attributes and Mapped Diagnostic Context

Thanks Eric!

New job - new beginnings !!!!

Last week was my last at INDUS Corporation where I worked for almost 5 years on a government contract with NTP. I started my career at INDUS as a junior programmer and worked my way up the corporate ladder to become Project Manager/Technical Lead. I truly enjoyed my career at INDUS and made some good friends. However now I feel that it is my time for a new challenge and experience.

Today was my first day of orientation with SRA International where I will be working as Sr Software Architect Lead on a goverment contract with NIEHS. I am very excited about this new and challenging opportunity as I'll be leading a team of 5-6 developers. We will be providing support and maintenance for over 50 ColdFusion applications and developing new ones as needed.

"Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does." -- William James

Tools for Agility

I recently finished a short article titled "Tools for Agility - White Paper" written by Kent Beck. I am using this blog post as a reminder to myself to revisit this article few months down the road. Kent provided a concise and to the point view of agile software development and dismissed various false notion about this practice. Here are few personal takeaways

1. Agile development seeks to increase the value of software development by an increased collaboration between customers and developers.

2. Individual and interactions are more valuable than processes and tools as processes and tools represent common situations. Tools and processes will be likely unable to adapt to any uncommon situation whereas human can.

3. With an outgrowth of Agile development, driving shorter release cycles, tools need to support frequent transition between activities.

4 Principal of flow - All other things being equal, frequent delivery of smaller batches of functionality is more valuable than infrequent hand over of larger batches of functionality.

5. In contrast to a miniature waterfall, agile development quickly integrates analysis, coding and testing and set up a quick feedback loop.

6. Transparency - Every quantitative change of an order of magnitude creates a qualitative change. Kent cited Test-Driven Development (TDD) as an metaphor where TDD encourages programmers to accept primary responsibility for the quality of their work.

7. A common activity for agile teams is toolsmithing.

You can view the article in it entirety here

Tools for Agility

CFUnited - code and presentation

As I mentioned during the session that I'll be releasing the code after the conference. It took me a while as some work related issues took precedence. Anyways without further delay, you can download the code from the following links

I appreciate the patience as several folks have emailed me to inquire about the code.