A bit left field with this post, I’m going to review a set of Vic Firth SIH1 Headphones and share my (positive) experience with Vic Firth Customer Service.
First off, a bit of a disclaimer, I’m no headphone aficionado so don’t expect an in depth analysis of the quality against any other headphones on the market!
Vic Firth predominantly make drum sticks, so inevitably these headsets are aimed at drummers. I play both acoustic and electric drums, so ideally I needed a set of headphones to use with both…
Often your requirements can overstep outlining the business need and into murky waters of business users defining technical solutions; which are rarely the way we would choose to do it, or in some cases even technically feasible.
“Has the world gone mad; or is it me?” – Ben Howard
As professionals it’s our obligation to probe these requirements until we’re left with something that makes sense that all parties are happy with. It’s always worth asking why, sometimes a requirement can disappear altogether as a result.
Make sure you understand how the component you are writing fits in with the architecture as a whole. As the Development Lead you’ll be expected to be capable of participating in conversation with all areas of your team and all levels of the business, from those with a vested interest in a particular piece of functionality, all the way up to those who aren’t interested in the minutiae, just the fact that the system works.
If you don’t understand how your software fits in with the wider Organisation you won’t be able to fulfil this. Again, if you can prove your understanding you’ll gain trust, but it’ll also enable you to more conclusively understand requirements if you understand for example what impact your validation (or lack of!) may have on downstream systems.
Are we there yet?
You’ll inevitably be asked (“probably” by Project Managers, and “probably” numerous times) whether you’ve finished a Task, it’s nice to have an answer to hand about not only your own work, but that of the team. Having a visible board to track progress on is really part of the Agile process, having one of these can ease the pressure, (but that doesn’t mean you won’t be asked!).
Not only is it good to have an answer to questions, but if you have an idea of whether your team is likely to finish all of the tasks on your current sprint then it will allow you to raise the alarm early, or re-prioritise workload within the team.
UWP apps, like the Windows Phone 7 and 8 platforms before them can have Background Tasks, while a background task for the Morse Coder app might not be enormously useful at this stage, let’s take a look at how to create one. In a further post we will look at updating the Live Tile from our Background Task.
Outcome
By the end of this post we’ll have a Background Task running on a schedule. It won’t do anything, but we will have set up the permission in the manifest, created the project, and our task class and registered it with the application. We will then be ready to implement the task.
Anyone who knows me will know that I play the drums and have done for many years. Throughout my teens I was a huge Blink 182 fan (Skateboard, hoody, etc.), not sure I ever really came out of that phase entirely. Travis was always an idol of mine, I still have a pair of his signature Zildjian drumsticks, which were really thick and somewhat like playing with white painted tree trunks.
