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General Programming

DRY is for Martini: I liked the quotation from this post: “code duplication is OVER *FUCKING* RATED. DRY is for Martini. Yes, I'm exaggerating” I was thinking about this because I found myself recently bemoaning my terrible code, where I was doing the exact same thing in two different places, and getting bitten when fixing the code in one place and not the other. Except the entire point is that it only happened to be the exact same thing, at that time. When it needed to change in only the one place, and not the other, I remembered that sometimes DRY...; posted @ Monday, May 20, 2013 12:01 AM | Feedback (0)

Repost: Unraveling the Developer Bias in Agile Development Practices: There is a little bit of irony in reposting this, as I think the concept of “Enterprise Architect” is not only bankrupt, but almost always harmful. In fact, I read most of Nick’s posts and think to myself something along the lines of “it’s kind of a shame to be doing something largely pointless.” But, I tend to agree with most of what he says here, especially little things like this: “As an agilest, I value people over processes. That means I value the contribution of individual experts on my team to do their work with excellence, and...; posted @ Tuesday, April 16, 2013 10:08 AM | Feedback (0)

Yet another reason why the software craftsmanship movement sucks: Here’s the description of the talk: “In this talk Robert C. Martin outlines the practices used by software craftsmen to maintain their professional ethics. He resolves the dilemma of speed vs. quality, and mess vs schedule. He provides a set of principles and simple Dos and Don’ts for teams who want to be counted as professional craftsmen.” The video sounds like it was recorded next to a cocktail party. You can always hear what Uncle Bob says, I never had a problem with that. Just keep that in mind if you listen to it. Now, as...; posted @ Wednesday, March 13, 2013 9:31 PM | Feedback (0)

Delivery vs Quality: I realize that just about anybody reading this will immediately think “but we can have both.” I understand that. This is just an example. At a client once, I came aboard with a bunch of other consultants around the same time (sometimes organizations do these weird things like letting entire groups of consultants go, along with their gained knowledge, and then have to pay the cost of having that knowledge needing to be relearned. There are ways that organizations can learn to do such things better, but I digress). With a large installed base of applications, various consultants were...; posted @ Thursday, February 21, 2013 11:44 AM | Feedback (0)

Turns out, NPM kinda sucks as well: So, for some project, it turns out that I’ve gotten to take a look at all of that Node.JS love. That in itself is another story. As it turns out, I needed some specific modules that sat on Github. Being total newbie, I figured you could just download stuff from Github and it would work, but of course, it generally almost never works that way. You do some “npm –install <module name>” magic and everything goes swimmingly. Or not. I’m at a location that has whatever port npm needs blocked at some firewall, so I need to use...; posted @ Friday, February 01, 2013 5:09 PM | Feedback (2)

Cleaning up Outlook RSS Feeds Subfolders: One of the wonderful <sarcasm> features </sarcasm> of Outlook’s RSS Feeds is that you cannot select multiple subfolders and delete them, instead you have to select them one by one. Ever accidentally import an OPML file more than once? Nothing like dozens and dozens of duplicate folders. It would be nice to just nuke everything and start over. Anyway, there is a programmatic way of doing it, which can be found here. Although it references Outlook 2007, the code works with Outlook 2013 (for the most part as I did have to manually delete a couple of them). ...; posted @ Sunday, December 16, 2012 2:16 PM | Feedback (0)

Becoming a Certified ScrumMaster: As part of a current role at a multinational financial organization, I had to take a two-day course and pass the test to become a CSM. Here are a couple of notes about that. The first thing to note is that the presenter, from RippleRock, was top notch. He was well experienced, highly knowledgeable, not a fanatical puritan, and British, to boot, which allowed me to spend the two days compiling a list of British idioms that I could then look up on the web. Fantastic, I had no idea “pants” could be used as a derogatory term, awesome....; posted @ Wednesday, November 14, 2012 10:12 PM | Feedback (0)

Bad analogy time: It's okay to be a line cook: I was trying to explain to non-software developers a certain point, and came up with one of my typically bad analogies. Though I hate the term, I guess I have to admit that I qualify as being a 'foodie.' Though I tend to discount some of the more political aspects of it, I buy into the whole food to table thing, cook for myself, believe in using local ingredients, and all that stuff. Because I am lucky enough to be financially successful, I enjoy the occasional visit to Michelin starred restaurants. I also remember being, in a much...; posted @ Thursday, November 01, 2012 12:13 AM | Feedback (0)

A sign your organization might not actually be practicing Scrum: If it has a day long meeting to plan out its next four sprints.; posted @ Thursday, September 06, 2012 9:32 AM | Feedback (0)

Finally: Windows 8 RTM on a MacBook Air under BootCamp with Unsigned Drivers: disclaimer: this worked on my machine. It might not on yours, so if you brick it, don’t blame me. In a couple of previous posts, I talked about my somewhat entertaining (if you are easily entertained) attempts to get Windows 8 RC to run under BootCamp without issue, and with all of the software and hardware that I require to use it as my full time machine, which essentially boiled down to getting the touchpad to work with secondary click, etc., FaceTime support, and the ability to use my Clear 4G USB stick when out at client sites, or...; posted @ Wednesday, August 22, 2012 12:21 PM | Feedback (0)

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