Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Agile Processes for the Solo Developer

Is it possible to take advantage of Agile Processes such as Scrum or Kanban as a solo developer?  That became my focus recently as I was working on the specifications for a website re-write.  Instead of creating detailed specifications, I started writing a collection of User Stories to define the functionality. I already knew the basics of what the website should look like since it already exists.  The new version would add some additional functionality such as allowing for on-line payments and user notifications by email under certain conditions.

The more I learned about Agile Processes, the more I envisioned how I could apply them to my own way of working.  As anyone who has read my other posts knows, I’ve been on the search for some time for a project management method that works for the solo developer.  After all this research, I’m thinking that utilizing Scrum and/or Kanban can accommodate the majority of my development and maintenance project management needs. Read the rest of this entry »

ABCpdf .NET Component

The ABCpdf component from WebSuperGoo enables easy creation and manipulation of PDF files from any .NET language.  I recently had an urgent project come up that made ABCpdf a perfect fit.

One of our clients request that the reports they used to receive by mail be sent electronically instead.  This client had hundreds of locations and we had been hand collating four reports for each location and stuffing each collation into an envelope.  Now I had to quickly find a way to do this programatically instead.  I didn’t have time to re-write my report module to produce a set of reports for each location, I had to figure out how to create this collation by processing each PDF individually.

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