Output Stream of Consciousness

Well, my coworker Robert actually went out and did it :)

I came back to work after my wedding to see two lava lamps on top of the filing cabinet outside our office.

We've been a fan of the Pragmatic Programmer people for a long time. They have a book and a site out about build automation, that is, getting a centralized computer to rebuild your software products without human intervention. If you commit code that causes the build process to come up with an error, whether it's a simple typo or the tests fail, then you have "broken the build", a condition that you should be fixing as soon as possible.

To that end, these days, you don't need to be as electronics-savvy as my friend Keith to do create an even more visible 'build is broken' signal - the parts are relatively easy to get a hold of.

This link describes in some detail how to put together such a system if you use CruiseControl as your build automation program.

I've yet to break the build on purpose to see whether the light goes red - I'm assured that it does. I guess that is one possible hazard in the early days of implementing this: everyone wants to see the light go red at some point :)