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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...
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Working with people is a lot like working with code. New relationships are green fields. Over time they become brown fields and (just like code) they require maintenance. I’m sure that everyone reading this can identify some legacy relationships that they would describer as, well, complicated. Just like...
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I yearn to be consistent. I want my professional values to be the same as my personal ones. This is why I was quick to sign the Agile Manifesto ; it aligned with my personal values. I have been overcommitted for the last couple of months and the stress has forced me to do some professional reevaluation...
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Today I had a conversation with our ‘scrum of scrum’ masters (we have 7 different scrum teams on our product team of 60+) and he asked me why someone would provide ‘developer tests’ as a task for the backlog? Before I go any further, this is NOT a bait type of email, simply my opinion. If you do...
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The other day on Twitter there was a stream whether it is better to completely scrap an applications code base and start over, or refactor from within. Now I do want to state right now: The information here is based on my experiences and is simply my opinion. I know this is almost on par...
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Often times as developers who understand what computers can do is really limitless, we seek to automate everything. The holy grail is being able to sit at where everything is accomplishable with a simple double-click. Often times automation, however wonderful or geek drool inspiring, is not cost effective...
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I am a little bored so I thought I would write a nice fluent interface around the Performance Counter crap that is part of .net. I know, I know the world does not really need another Fluent Interface around something, but I am bored and this is keeping be busy while waiting for my flight. Anyway...
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We talk about how important it is to keep your code in working order, but no one ever really talks about keeping the container for your code in working order --- Your Project Solutions. Per Wikipedia Refactoring code can be defined as: Means improving it without changing its overall results, and is sometimes...