Brian Ball

Recent Articles

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Rise of the Tetrad

Ember has about six concepts that once you understand a bit will help you unlock the documentation and figure out how to develop your site. I have written before about not needing to fully understand ember before working on a project, but once you start getting your feet under you and need to branch out. […]
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The Ember Path

There was a recent blog post by Rob Conery about learning EmberJs by just flinging yourself at it. That was something that kind of resonated with me. I’ve been trying to understand EmberJS for a while, but I wasn’t getting it. I wasn’t feeling confident enough to actually start a project and get it right. […]

A quick note on EmberJs and ReactiveJS

I tweeted yesterday that I was having trouble with EmberJS and ReactiveJS integration. I’m hip-deep in an emberjs app and I can’t get my canvas to pump events through rxjs… — Brian J Ball (@Myotherpants) June 3, 2014 Well, I figured it out! With some help from the fine ReactiveX folks. The long story short […]

Where is your Horizon?

Here at SEP, we sometimes use a diagram to discuss the various career paths open to our Developers. And by Developers I don’t refer solely to those who write code, but also Testers, Leads, and Managers. There are other tracks open to our staff, but these are the most common for our engineering staff. ![Career […]

Scaling Communication

This week, I was given a prompt asking “How do you communicate.” My first instinct was, “poorly.” Okay, that’s not strictly true. It’s more like, “obliquely.” I’m more comfortable with analogies than straight up saying, “it depends.” Don’t worry. I’m still going to tell you how to scale communication. Two kids sat down to play. […]

Make it Real. Make it Simple.

Make it Real. Make it Simple. There is a lesson that keeps becoming apparent the more I practice Agile or Lean methods. Simple is best. To illustrate the point, I want to talk about some tools that are powerful because they are simple. Paper Prototype One of the easiest ways to gain shared understanging of […]
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Sometimes the Tools of the Trade Take Time

I’m not a very good woodworker. I rush things. I have a general rule when I do work with wood and saws, I only work for about two to three hours at a time. If I try to work longer, I find myself getting anxious to finish. Not to quit for the day, but to […]
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Even With Structure, The Possibilities are Endless

Poetry is an art form based on structure. The pinnacle of poetry studied by most everyone on their high school English class is the sonnet. As a refresher, a sonnet has 14 lines of iambic pentameter using a handful of rhyming schemes to group lines in to an octet that builds rising tension followed by […]