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Soapbox

More Reasons Why Integration Tests Can Be More Important Than Unit Tests: Over at CodeBetter, Patrick Smacchia (the NDepend dude) recently has blogged a couple of posts about “Tests Driven Development” (not sure if the extra ‘s’ is supposed to signify something important or if that’s just what he calls it). I’ve written at other times about why I’m not a big fan of TDD so won’t go through all of that blah blah blah here, but some more events at clients have re-iterated to me why Integration Tests are often much more important than unit tests. Patrick talks about using code contracts as integral, and I agree with...; posted @ Friday, July 16, 2010 9:47 PM | Feedback (0)

Advantages of being a contractor: Davy Brion has a good post about overtime that is worth a read. I’d like to expand on my comment to his post. I should note that this applies beyond IT. It seems to be an expectation in many organizations that the people who work for them should need to work more than 40 hours a week. This is unfortunate, but it is what it is. As a contractor, you can bill for it. End of story. If the organization you work for, for whatever reason, good or bad, has this sort of expectation, then your...; posted @ Wednesday, June 30, 2010 7:17 PM | Feedback (0)

On the Ontological Nature of Comedic Discourse: Or, more succinctly, is Dane Cook remotely funny? Sirius Radio I spend a lot of time driving. At a previous client, I used to have one of those fantastic 2+ hours a day commute going out to the west ‘suburbs’ of Chicago (if you can call either Lisle or Naperville a suburb) and while I don’t miss it at all (well, I miss a person or two from the client, I guess), I used it to keep at least vague track of contemporary music and listen to a lot of sports radio (digression…I have never, ever been accused...; posted @ Monday, June 28, 2010 9:53 PM | Feedback (0)

Horrible Performance is a Bug: TDD can’t help you when it comes to determining the performance of a software development project. Imagine if you will a situation where you are dealing with a 3rd party vended application, and you work through all of the functional requirements in a UAT environment. Imagine that you have previous experience where related software projects have performed by orders of magnitude better in PROD than in UAT. When the important software development project is migrated to Production, how will it actually perform? Anyone with any decent amount of experience already knows the horrific result of finding out that...; posted @ Tuesday, June 22, 2010 8:55 PM | Feedback (0)

Without having to write code: I’m going to be zinging Microsoft here, as the most obvious target, but they aren’t the only one. It’s a general point. In the most recent MSDN Magazine, there’s an article about how to work with WCF and WF4 (they can’t call it WWF4 for legal purposes), and I have no opinion about the content in general. But I want to focus on this one thing: “In this article, I will explain how to combine several features of WCF and WF that were introduced in the .NET Framework 4 to model a long-running, durable and instrumented mortgage-approval process...; posted @ Wednesday, May 26, 2010 8:13 PM | Feedback (0)

RavenDB, and a brief design philosophy discussion with Ayende: Suppose you design a system that is chock full of interfaces, specifically things like some version of IRepository, where you have the ability to change out your backing store/database more easily. A common criticism of this sort of design is that it is unrealistic to think you actually will change your main backing store/database in a production system. My own experience is that while it does happen (a current client project I am working on involves changing the backing database for a set of applications from SQL Server to Oracle, for instance), it doesn’t happen often, and you often...; posted @ Friday, May 21, 2010 7:44 PM | Feedback (0)

Code cannot and should not replace technical documentation: I’ve written recently about technical documentation and the good and bad about it. Over at ElegantCode, new member John Sommez has started out with some posts about eliminating comments from code, and most recently, about how unit tests can replace the need for technical documentation for developers working on a system. I would go ahead and read what he has to say. It’s well-written, and he’s obviously given some thought to the topics. Unfortunately, I think the advice he gives is wrong, and would like to explain why. As developers, we almost always run into the problem...; posted @ Tuesday, April 27, 2010 11:53 PM | Feedback (0)

Hello SSIS My Old Friend: A few years ago, Ayende had a post about why he hated SSIS, which brought about some responses (here and here and here) from some other folks. It was a lot of fun had by all (sarcasm). I happened to be doing some work prototyping SSIS and whether it could be used to replace some of the Perl-based implementations we had in place. After only a little bit of effort, we clearly determined that SSIS couldn’t hack it (which is ironic, since getting SSIS to do many common tasks required a lot of hacking, but I digress). digression: I...; posted @ Tuesday, April 13, 2010 12:08 AM | Feedback (0)

Good Reading – Life Beyond Distributed Transactions by Pat Helland: One of the things I’ve been doing the last few months is to go over the vast reams of printouts that I have of articles, blog posts, etc. and find the things that are more immediately valuable and chucking the rest. I got into a habit of printing out anything that might possibly be useful, and ended up with a lot of stuff that, well, I just didn’t need. So YAGNI to it. If it doesn’t possibly apply to a current active project of mine, chuck it (which is really only kinda-YAGNI, but it eliminates 80+% of stuff, so good...; posted @ Tuesday, April 06, 2010 8:12 PM | Feedback (0)

The Paradox of Technical Documentation: At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein has a famous quotation: 6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) More or less, I feel the same way about technical documentation. Sometimes, you will hear someone say that all you need when it comes to documentation is the code itself, but this is, obviously, silly. Besides the...; posted @ Monday, April 05, 2010 9:01 PM | Feedback (2)

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