October 2008
24 posts
“To sum it up, if you are open and clear in the way you ask questions, people...”
– The Importance of Questions by Travis Birch.
Working Effectively With Legacy Code →
Short version of Michael Feathers’ excellent book. Every project has legacy code, so this is a must read.
po-ru.com: Comment guidelines →
By attempting to spam my websiteâby which I mean by leaving comments of an irrelevant, unwanted commercial nature, or by using an automated system to leave commercial commentsâyou are granting me…
Icelanders are NOT terrorists →
“Top-down, high-control management techniques have proven to be orthogonal to the...”
– Good Management Can Work Miracles by Ross Pettit.
“Agile methods are made of processes, principles and tools. But most importantly...”
– What is Agile? by Travis Birch.
“[…] 100% coverage never guarantees that the code is well tested. But doing...”
– Increasing Code Coverage May Be Harmful by Dan Manges.
“* The best way we know to get a big jump in quality and to be able to frequently...”
– OpenView conference report by Edward Hieatt of Pivotal Labs.
“What I cannot create, I do not understand.”
– Written by Richard Feynman on his last blackboard.
“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”
– In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome by Joel Spolsky.
“Life here in Iceland is getting interesting, as we can’t transfer money out of...”
– All your money are belong to us [sic] by Richard Yeo.
“Should our monetary system be reformed so that it is based on a pure gold coin...”
– Our Money Madness by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
“Usage logs can provide useful inputs to user interface and web site designs. But...”
– The Weblog Skeptic by Scott McDaniel.
“Even though I’ve never worked with Steve or Nat, the maintainers of JMock, I...”
– The World Mocks Too Much by Patrick Kua.
Shorten your iteration... →
Every time you shorten your iteration length, your team will realize that there are things that are time-consuming and painful. They will argue that doing it more frequently is less productive….
“If it hurts, do it more often.”
– A phrase Martin Fowler likes to use in an Agile context: “Its surface illogicality makes it memorable, and there’s a real truth in there. Many difficult activities can be made much more straightforward by doing them more frequently.”
Automated story-based acceptance tests lead to... →
Avoid temporal coupling in the design of your tests. The same poor design principle of relating chunks of code together simply because someone asked for them at the same time, also apply to how you…
“Money can’t buy you love, but love can bring you money. In software the...”
– The Origin Of The CD-Keys, Part Three by Daniel James.
“[…] why is it that some developers turn out so much more code than the...”
– Fear of Programming - RubyConf 2008 talk by Nathaniel Talbott.
“* I get lethargic/depressed/unproductive/unhappy when I’m not spending a...”
– RubyConf Speaker Interview: Nathaniel Talbott by Chad Fowler.
“I had an idea for another little tool yesterday. I wrote it without any tests,...”
– Just Ship, Baby by Kent Beck.
“[…] the first year of work is mostly spent understanding existing code,...”
– Why it pays to take the time to write readable code by Steve Freeman.