Anne Epstein

Why is mercurial hanging during adding file changes?

So, I was opening a new project in mercurial that had a bit of a history. I ran the normal: hg clone ssh://hg@bitbucket.org/mycompany/somerepository Which has worked pretty fast on the smaller repositories that I've cloned. THIS time, it got to "adding...

Published 08-11-2011 4:35 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: mercurial, hg

Python’s Yield

This week, I’ve been playing with implementing an HTTP client in Python. Why Python? It seemed like a straightforward language for this sort of thing, and the fact that I don’t know it at all is a bonus learning opportunity! In any case, I make no claim...

Published 01-27-2011 12:40 AM by Anne Epstein

R is for Reliability

37 Signals was in the news last year for the wrong reasons: they experienced multiple outages in a short time period. From their own site, “ The virtual machines had severely degraded network and CPU performance causing them to grind to a halt.”...

Published 01-08-2011 6:59 PM by Anne Epstein

Passive voice is killing your design documents

Recently, I was proofreading a technical design document written about a system that was unfamiliar to me. It described the flow of execution through a fairly complex system. I found it more difficult to follow the design than it should have been, but...

Published 08-11-2010 8:02 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: writing, grammar

Why I'm a programmer

I don't know if you can say I'm a programmer solely because of my dad(by training a physicist and by profession an engineer), but he was a big part of getting me there. I had my first experiences with a computer when I was very young, no older...

Published 06-19-2010 12:23 AM by Anne Epstein

Winforms (and WPF) Testing

Those of us who primarily work on web projects have a fairly good idea of what's available for automating UI testing of web applications; Selenium and WatiN , for instance. At Headspring, we take this up a level by isolating our UI testing code from...

Published 03-24-2010 2:33 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: winforms testing white

On Learning

As programmers, we work in a discipline that is a bit different from that of many other people we know. Many other disciplines have developed to a point of reasonable maturity and stability, with a broad, long-agreed-upon base of knowledge, educational...

Published 12-28-2009 9:01 AM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: learning

NHibernate and Composite Keys

Composite IDs are a common pain point a beginning NHibernate user runs into. Here's everything you need to get them up and running. First, a caveat: composite keys are certainly mappable in NHibernate, but it's a little trickier than a typical...

Published 11-20-2009 7:29 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: NHibernate

NHibernate Caching and Assigned Ids - A Potential Pitfall

Yesterday, I spent some time setting up and optimizing SysCache2 caching. (By the way, if you're doing this kind of NHibernate tuning, NHProf - a devlicio.us friend - is crucial, it would have definitely been a much tougher slog without it) With caching...

Published 10-08-2009 8:53 AM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: NHibernate, Caching

You are your Institutional Knowledge

In the midst of recession, many companies are closing locations and laying off staff to cut costs. The thinking from many of these companies is that the remaining staff can pick up any projects the laid-off staff previously did, resulting in all the important...

Published 08-27-2009 10:38 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: truck factor, management

Bottlenecks

I’ve been reading though Implementing Lean Software Development as a member of the San Antonio Tech Book Club . Bottlenecks are discussed in Chapter 7, and I had some notes/reflections on the subject… Lean suggests that it’s important...

Published 07-22-2009 12:46 AM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: Lean

Austin Code Camp 2009

I just wanted to give a heads-up to people in the central Texas area that a great event is coming up at the end of the month: Austin Code Camp 2009 . It's taking place May 30th, and the lineup of likely sessions is looking fantastic. Our friends at...

Published 05-17-2009 6:57 PM by Anne Epstein

VB.Net and the Case of the Iffy Ifs

Previous Items in Series: Intro to series on quality VB.Net VB.Net and the Spaghetti Code Of Doom In the previous item in this series , we looked at a pretty typical class, discussed some of its problems, and started in on fixing those problems. We finished...

Published 05-12-2009 12:49 AM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: VB.Net

The Case for Multiple DBs in Multi Tenancy situations

Multitenancy isn't easy, and one of the particularly challenging aspects is what to do with the database. In Ayende's excellent posts on multi tenancy, he's pretty clear that he feels a database per tenant is the way to go . There are two...

Published 04-24-2009 12:49 AM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: multitenancy

Scrum-It's not about completing the sprint

This week, I was reading " Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C# " by Robert Martin. In one of the early chapters, he talks a bit about Scrum, and mentions that working overtime (excepting the week of the release sprint) is a big antipattern...

Published 03-26-2009 11:18 PM by Anne Epstein

Filed under: scrum

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