About Me
My name is Mike Norton and I am an Enterprise Architect for the American Chemical Society. As a seasoned technologist, I have spent the last 15 years pursuing my passion for solving business problems with technology solutions and leading diverse and distributed teams in doing the same. This blog is a place for me to write about software development, managing distributed teams, technology matters, books I'm reading and anything else I decide to spout off about.
Coding with Intent?
The name for this blog came to me a couple of years ago - I had just read The Pragmatic Programmer and was energized anew about the craft of software development. It occurred to me that too much of what many of us in the software profession do (myself first and foremost) is reactive programming. It's just way too easy to dive into a problem and write code that isn't tested, isn't well thought out, isn't focused on a specific purpose. I resolved to myself that I was going to start taking the craft more seriously and the rest is history.
- Waterfall by training, Agile by choice. :-) I am a firm believer in the tenets of the Agile Manifesto and believe that the various methodologies that embrace Agile tenets (Scrum, Kanban, Lean, etc) are the best way to do things.
- Polyglot Programming
After years of PHP and then Java/JEE development, I stumbled upon Groovy and heard Neal Ford speak about Polyglot Programming. I believe every good developer should be able to apply the correct language/paradigm to each new problem and that often that means combining multiple technologies/languages into a single application and running languages like JRuby, Groovy or Scala on the JVM. - Atlassian Tools
I have been using the Atlassian suite of tools (Confluence, JIRA, GreenHopper, Bamboo, FishEye, Crucible and yes, even Crowd) to manage the development process for over two years now. In early 2010 I decided to reach out to Atlassian and see about starting a user group in the DC Metro area - I was given the greenlight and the DCAUG has been meeting every 3 months ever since. - Software Development as a "Craft"
As I mentioned above in the section about the name of this blog, I view Software Development as a craft and one that must be honed, improved and focused on with intent in order to be good at it.
While I absolutely eat, sleep and breath the things above, my primary passions in life are my God and my family. My lovely wife Annie and I have been married for 12 years and our three children are the light of our lives. I have been known to brew a pretty decent beer on occasion and I enjoy reading, shooting trap, tinkering on my iPhone and playing the occasional pickup flag football or ultimate frisbee game.
This is my personal blog and the opinions I express here are not necessarily representative of my employer, the American Chemical Society.
