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Today I was having a conversation with one of the developers on my team (btw, this guy is going to be a rock star) and I made that statement to him that I thought we had some noisy code. The context around this conversation was with our usage of AutoMapper (which I love so DO NOT take this as a...
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Now before you write off this post as being ‘just another silly request’ hear me out. Right now in C# we can do the following switch( someObject ) { case Option1: case Option2: case Option3: // do something break; case Option4: // do something break: } Allowing fall through for a switch statement is...
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I’m currently reading Thomas Sowell’s A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles . As the title suggests, it deals with certain fundamental differences in the way we see the world and how that affects our political views. Don’t worry, I’m not going to delve into politics in the...
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Many months ago I wrote a letter to upper management about principles of software development and the ways in which should build software. Since that time my role has changed within the company and for the first time in my career I’m managing a significant number of people (at a previous company...
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It does not take a genius to realize that I (and most others on this blog) are fans of JetBrains . But what it may take a genius to realize is it takes balls to do what JetBrains does with their products. You may be asking what exactly I am talking about or referring to? I am taking...
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Over the weekend I was having a conversation with my wife and we were not communicating on the same wave length. After a few minutes of talking in circles it dawned on us that we had not established the context around the conversation and we had no real understanding of what either of us was saying...
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So the fires continue to burn, as Joel Spolsky’s internet access hasn’t been disconnected. For someone who is supposed to be an idiot and irrelevant, a lot of people still read and link to him. I guess one guy is corrupting all the new developers, who are assumed to be reading Joel’s...
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I am 99% sure I have had a post like this in the past, but my google-foo was weak today and I could not find it. Do not let anyone blow smoke up your back side, testing is expensive, testing takes time but most importantly testing can help improve the quality of your code. If you are going to spend...
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I assume everyone is familiar with the children's book Chicken Little where the chicken little had an acorn fall on her head and she just assume the entire sky was falling so she ran to the king to tell him such. Well, sadly too many times people in our industry do the same thing. Today I received...
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The blogosphere has gone a bit crazy the last few days with posts responding to Joel Spolsky’s latest article about "The Duct Tape Programmer" . Bloggers everywhere are tossing their two cents in and saying what parts of Joel's post was good and what wasn't good. Once noticeable trend...
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Things I’ve said in a session before: “Friends don’t let friends ORM” “ORM is a pattern, not a framework” “I like typed datasets, and I cannot lie” It’s not that I’m anti-ORM, or believe popular ones like NHibernate, Linq2Sql, and EF are useless...
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If you find yourself using reflection in your unit test to push 'stub’ data into it your test just may smell. Now there are times (especially when dealing with legacy code) that you need use reflection to crack open a class to push/pull values but I would strongly suggest you consider the solutions...
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One of my biggest professional hindrances is a lack of confidence. I don’t have a CS degree. In fact, I have almost zero technical academic training. (My degree is in Religious Studies). In addition, I hang out with a lot of very smart and motivated programming gurus. I tend to judge myself by what they...
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Today I was asked what I thought about asking each of our feature teams to report the total number of new unit tests created during their iteration. My knee-jerk reaction was to ask the person WTF were they thinking. However, my better sense (yea, I have a little common sense) kicked in....
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Here we are almost 2 full years since the var keyword was released to the wild, and only a few short months (I hope) till the next release of the .net framework and still the hatred for the var keyword lives on. The other day I woke up to find the following rant waiting for me in an IM window: [21:46...