Posted by robbie on January 10, 2012 – 9:42 am
I first heard of the concept of Convex Leadership during a TEDTalk by R.A. Mashelkar, when he was speaking at TEDIndia in 2009. His talk discussed breakthrough designs for ultra low cost products being developed in India. Borrowing the concept, Gandhian engineering, from Tata Motors, his discussion expanded on the concept of frugality and challenging conventional wisdom in technological innovations, engineering and new product development. Getting more, from less, for more….. meaning Getting more service, from less resources, for more people. Amazing concept for the manufacturing and production world; especially for a world of depleting resources and a population that can’t afford luxurious overpriced designs.
Going back to the concept of convex leadership, the talk by Mashelkar brought up the idea of how leaders can transform the views and perceptions of those around them to focus and act as one; this type of leadership is needed to take advantage of concepts like Gandhian Engineering. Mashelkar further discusses how he came up with the concept:
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Article source: http://www.robbiemadan.com/2012/01/04/the-art-of-leadership
Posted by robbie on January 4, 2012 – 9:46 am
We all use development frameworks during the course of our projects. Frameworks help us to be efficient developers by re-using existing components and providing us with avoinding the overhead associated with developing applications.
ASP.NET MVC is still a fairly new framework – the majority of ASP.NET projects use Web Forms and they have been successfully serving client’s needs for years, but the rise of MVC fills a much needed hole for ASP.NET.
ASP.NET has many strengths and weaknesses:
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Article source: http://www.robbiemadan.com/2011/12/18/asp-net-mvc-vs-web-forms-another-opinion
Posted by robbie on September 20, 2011 – 11:50 am
One of the basic rules of designing an application is to separate out your data access layer and business layer. But often your data access object’s properties are a fairly accurate representation of the same properties present in your business objects. So, we’re all stuck writing fairly straight forward translation code, until now. AutoMapper handles all the work for you by attempting to resolve the mapping itself by looking for similar named properties. Here’s an example: Read More »
Posted by robbie on August 5, 2011 – 11:54 am
NuGet is a recent extension to Visual Studio. For those of you familiar with Ruby’s gems, it allows you do the same thing – download, install and update libraries that are connected to its libraries, which makes working with third party libraries much easier.
In this post, I’ll go through how to install and use NuGet within the command prompt to get a third party component installed. In this example, we will install ELMAH, a set of error logging modules and handlers for ASP.NET. If your not familiar with ELMAH, I suggest you stay tuned into my future posts as I will be covering the benefits of using ELMAH in your projects.
The first step is to install NuGet. You can download a copy from http://nuget.org, the latest version is currently 1.4.
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Posted by robbie on June 30, 2011 – 8:54 am
The title of this post is a quote from a book I recently finished reading, Rework by Jason Fried and David Hansson, founders of 37signals, and I wanted to share the rest of that quote from them because it really made me sit back and think:
You don’t create a culture
Instant cultures are artificial cultures. They’re big bangs made of mission statements, declarations, and rules. They are obvious, ugly, and plastic. Artificial culture is paint. Real culture is patina.
You don’t create a culture. It happens. This is why new companies don’t have a culture. Culture is the byproduct of consistent behavior. If you encourage people to share, then sharing will be built into your culture. If you reward trust, then trust will be built in. If you treat customers right, then treating customers right becomes your culture.
Culture isn’t a foosball table or trust falls. It isn’t policy. It isn’t the Christmas party or the company picnic. Those are objects and events, not culture. And it’s not a slogan, either. Culture is action, not words.
So don’t worry too much about it. Don’t force it. You can’t install a culture. Like a fine scotch, you’ve got to give it time to develop.
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Publicly available API’s are rarely open completely to the public; they always employ some method of security or tracking to either keep statistics or audit who is accessing them. Some of the methods often used to track or secure an API request are: