February 2009
30 posts
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly... →
Started reading The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
“Clusterify is a better way to meet other programmers working with the same...”
– Clusterify - Concepts Underlying the Site. Sounds interesting.
“The XP customer role needed help. I now understand that role to be the most...”
– The product owner and the product-shaped hole by Jeff Paton. Why every XP team needs an Edwin.
“* Impose yourself early in the process, insisting on wireframes and information...”
– CSS vs. Tables: Maybe the design is to blame? via Paul Battley.
“* Disclose what your infrastructure is and let users decide if they trust it
*...”
– What every online service can learn from Ma.gnolia’s experience by Transparent Uptime. Good advice for SaaS operators.
“Homeopathic Economics
The Government is now on a course of borrowing that is...”
– A Progressive Crisis by Frank Field MP. An interesting analogy.
“Show me metrics that have been thoughtfully conceived, reliably obtained,...”
– Meaningful Metrics by Michael Bolton. Really excellent.
“Small methods are the object oriented equivalent of side effect free programming...”
– OO Side Effect Free Programming by Mark Myzk.
The Lie →
“No, the problem isn’t you. Fixtures suck, and you were lied to”. I’m pleased that techno weenie is in favour of dropping fixtures out of Rails.
“So, bugs. Do tests find ‘em? Good lord, yes. I don’t know what kind of unit...”
– Do unit tests find bugs? by Brian Guthrie. Sensible commentary on the Spolsky TDD spat.
“But what I’ve never understood is why fixtures are actually easier for a noob...”
– On fixtures and first-time testers by Francis Hwang.
Twitter / RonJeffries: Teams cease to improve... →
Teams cease to improve. They do not see, will not change, are not led. This is not the fault of XP or Scrum or maybe even “Agile”
“So what should Alex do? Continuously deploy. Every commit should be instantly...”
– Continuous Deployment by Timothy Fitz.
Ruby Lightning Talks at LRUG Feb 2009 →
“I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as...”
– Kent Beck in answer to “How deep are your unit tests?”.
“I don’t like seeing people focus on “what” and missing...”
– Kent Beck in answer to “What don’t you like in agile development?”
Skiing and Boarding At Allenheads →
A local ski resort in Northumberland.
SEO At the Enterprise Level – A Major Flop →
When I hear SEO, I think snake-oil. The whole industry is tainted by the stink of pseudo-science. Go to the SEO conference in NY and you’ll see every Tom, Dick and Guido with their own special recipe…
Feb 23, 2009: Supermondays at The Research Beehive →
SuperMondays is a strong and vibrant community of IT enthusiasts based in The North East of England. We meet up once a month for a range of IT user group meetings and some unstructured discussions. …
“Testing can help you-
* Design
* Protect against regression
*...”
– Thoughts on Developer Testing by Jay Fields.
“Another common pain point in testing is duplicate code. People go to great...”
– Thoughts on Developer Testing by Jay Fields.
“I can think of countless examples of people doing it wrong and dismissing the...”
– Thoughts on Developer Testing by Jay Fields.
“My point is that we can’t look at testing mechanistically. Unit testing...”
– The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing by Michael Feathers.
“One very common theory about unit testing is that quality comes from removing...”
– The Flawed Theory Behind Unit Testing by Michael Feathers.
Remote pair-programming using iChat →
What has surprised me the most is just how effective this approach has been. I feel like we have been working just as effectively as if we had been sat in the same room together. We get from all of…
Ioke mocking, Mocha as exemplar →
It’s been tremendous fun and as usual I’ve gone through my share of pain, but one of the nicest parts has been actually spending time inside Mocha itself after it became clear that I needed a bit of…
“Each one of those lines is pretty dense: it requires a lot of backtracking to...”
– Ioke mocking, Mocha as exemplar by Brian Guthrie.
“As XP / Agile / Scrum have become more popular, many teams and individuals have...”
– Context, My Foot! by Ron Jeffries via Alan Francis.
