1. Use improv the illustrate process descriptions. You’ll be able to see and understand the process in a different way and can help identify errors and bottlenecks before going too deep into design.

2. Hire an artist to capture requirements and planning meetings. Artists interpret and capture meaning, unlike photographs.

3. Put a big HDTV in the team space for planning, tracking, and visualizing burndown, etc.

4. Extreme interviewing: bring in multiple candidates and make them work together. See if they have good kindergarten skills and if they will have the right team motivation and instincts to work with your current team.

An off-hand discussion at work (“This application is being used by more groups now . . . wouldn’t it be cool to make it so they can develop independently?”) led to me looking into Java classloaders this weekend. Here’s the core for an application that’s treated like a bus in that it looks to see what’s plugged into it and provides communications (context) to each plug-in.
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I just got done running my second Heroic on Kadee, my much neglected Paladin: Violet Hold and Halls of Stone. Blizzard isn’t do a great job doing gearscore matching, though:

Thanks to the group that stuck with me through it. I didn’t die, but I can’t say the same for the other melee DPS in the group.

After my, what, 30th wipe in Halls of Reflection Heroic, this time to a tank that wouldn’t pull waves back to the group but kept trying to fight on the altar, finally keeping Falric out of my healing range after I was feared in the opposite direction, I’m convinced Halls of Reflection is actually a gold tax on people using the random group tool.

I’ve run it successfully despite a lot of bad pugs but I much prefer doing it with a guild group. Becky saw how bad it was on normal mode today when she ran it with one of her Hunters. By comparison, Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron are cakewalks.

Maybe it’s because Halls of Reflection is a healing test, or maybe it’s because most pugs can’t seem to assist. When I ran it earlier today on Normal mode, I made sure everyone knew to assist off the main tank (a mediocre Death Knight, but it’s tough to be a good DK tank). At the least, a successful HoR group can pull 3k DPS per character, minus the healer and maybe the tank — any less and I’m out of mana or dead before I can keep the group’s health up. I feel like HoR was really built around the Holy Priest, even more so than the Tribunal encounter in Halls of Stone.

So we ran heroic Oculus with a dismounted healer (me) today. It was unintentional: I got knocked down early and landed on Treasure Island safely, where I healed myself up and started healing the other drakes. It was much easier to keep the rest of the group up as a T9 Tree than it was on a green drake. We won with only one other player getting dismounted.

Edit: My second Oculus of the day disbanded before I could pick up a drake. I replaced a healer who quit after a wipe on Eregos: people are still convinced this is hard, which just goes to show they never tried it before 3.3 nerfed him. Amber Void, Emerald Void, and Ruby Void are much more attainable now than they were a month ago.

I’ve been running a lot of random heroics (10-15 a day on weekends — I’m putting together two sets of T9+) and have noticed that as the other players gear up, my HPS has done down faster than my Healing Spellpower has gone up.

In my last run, for instance, I got 1744.7 HPS for a total of 1,485,319 points of healing on a Halls of Lightning run. Two weeks ago, my HPS would have been closer to 2200 and I would have had to heal nearly 2 million points. At the same time, my overhealing has slightly declined (I’m better about only renewing HOTs when needed), and accounted for more potential healing than healing performed. Blame the Warlock or blame the HOts, the fact is that other players require less healing as they gear into Tier 9.

Role	DPS	Healing Taken	Gear Score
Tank (Warrior)	1485.4	923,697	4473
DPS (Ret Pally)	2712.2	320,807	4850
DPS (Destro Warlock)	2479.7	265,365	4803
DPS (Enh Shaman)	3031.3	157,341	4850
Healer (Resto Druid)		125,574	4629

At this time, I only start finding my maximum HPS on raids where the entire group takes damage as once.

Examining the heal values themselves helps to show how overhealing occurs (ignoring crits):

• Rejuvenation: 2001 per tick
• Regrowth: 4600 hit, 1095 per tick
• Lifebloom: 843 tick average, 1487 max tick; 2529 hit average, 8830 hit maximum
• Nourish: 6409 average
• Living Seed: 2598 average
• Wild Growth: 770 average per tick
• Glyph of Rejuvenation: 1175 average per tick

So as my healing spellpower has gone up from 2000 to 2500, my HPS has gone down from 2200 to 1700 because other players are better geared.

Here’s my updated UI for World of Warcraft.

Buttons are laid out to match the Logitech G13 — the exact choice for each button is still being tweaked, but it’s pretty close to done. Main chat and Grid are next to each other to watch player health, discussion, and DBM warnings in the chat log.

Tanking is done using the same UI with different buttons (replacing the set by virtue of the extra bar groups with multiple talent specs).

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In World of Warcraft, I’m playing one of two roles lately: tank and healer. Patch 3.3 has been released and here are the big impacts on those roles:

Classes: General

• Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.

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I’ve dealt with Java services at Amazon too long when I can spot one by the CPU/memory signature.

This is pretty typical of a long-running service garbage collecting with old generation objects. Note the CPU utilization as the VM removes old generation objects and subsequent drop in memory utilization.

I’ve been snatching 30 and 60 minute blocks of time in the evenings and on the weekends to get back to work on my Radar test in Python with PyGame from nearly four years ago. PyGame 1.9.1 installed easily on my Windows box and OS X laptop and integrated well with Python 3.1 (on Windows) and Stackless Python 2.6 (on OS X). The only significant changes to be made in the code between Python 2 and Python 3 had to do with exception handling.
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