Web Site Update

Thought about it some more… need to just get things done so new Sunwapta Web Site version one will focus on content and not so much on being an unusual tech site. Just not enough time to do everything.

However, we have a product launch scheduled for September and I will be creating a brand new site for that. That is where I will focus my creative energies.

Convention over Configuration

This evening I went to a Calgary .NET User Group meeting and presentation by James Kovacs (MVP) on "Convention over Configuration". Another passionate presentation by a very talented developer covering a lot of pieces of the development puzzle (Fluent nHibernate, nHibernate, mappers, JQuery, IOC containers, etc.)

The underlying theme tied it all together and really made sense to me. With careful design and strong understanding of your tools, you can use convention (rules and tools) to automate a lot of the plumbing in an application; especially during the critical unknown and fast paced early stages where the domain model is rapidly changing.

Client Application Performance Tuning

We've been working on a client application for a while and talking about improving performance. The calculations are very complex, actuarial formulas, and there are a great number of them in the model. Realized it is time to break the problem down, implement tests for each piece and then re-factor the application to improve performance. Having tests (speed and calculation accuracy) will allow us to make changes quickly without worrying about breaking the calculations.

It's nice to be able to apply some of the coding best practices to pieces normally done outside the raw code by a separate team.