BlogCoward - Rants

Rants

I Like Windows Home Server: I took my computer into the place I bought it, so that I could get them to figure out why it won’t turn on. I’m hoping it’s just the power supply that’s crapped out. Turns out there’s a six day waiting list till they even get to it, but out of stubborn principle, I’ll wait. <rant>there are just certain things I don’t want to do anymore, damn it. I used to be a line cook (though a friend of mine is/was a chef, I never got that bug, which is probably a good thing, because being in the food...; posted @ Tuesday, August 31, 2010 1:11 PM | Feedback (0)

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)

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)

A description of a not entirely ideal software development project: Names and places are changed to protect…well, to protect against any personal liability. You can guess the rest. The first thing you will note about a project like this is that the actual end user and/or business requirements are not really defined until you are at least 75% through the development of the software that is supposed to support the requirements. An important thing to highlight here is that the actual end user requirements and the business requirements are not necessarily the same. No, it would be folly to think that they were. Another fine point is when...; posted @ Friday, June 18, 2010 7:21 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)

Blog Comments or “Saint jdn – fighting Those Who Cared”: I have to explain the new tag line. Updated: the new tag line was fine for a day. Back to what it has always been. In the meantime, don’t forget the first rule of the Blogosphere: opinions are like assholes. Everyone that has one, is one. Because of the weird phenomenon of people in Eastern Europe posting spam links that advertise porn or poker or whatever, I have moderation turned on for the site. It’s annoying because almost no one reads this thing and almost no one comments on it (except maybe to say “DOH! I did...; posted @ Sunday, February 07, 2010 9:28 PM | Feedback (5)

Why don’t TV Sports Announcers Watch Their Own Broadcasts?: Okay, I understand why they wouldn’t actually watch TV while broadcasting the game, but it’s starting to get ridiculous. I’ll focus on hockey and football, because that is what I watch mostly. Watching tonight the big Ovechkin/Crosby rematch…err, the Caps/Pens first game since their epic (Jim Rome shout-out for a member of the crowd) playoff battle, and Crosby scores on one of those weird goals where the goalie wanders out to play a puck and it takes an odd bounce to sit in front of the net for the opposing team to knock in. This one was doubly-weird...; posted @ Thursday, January 21, 2010 8:53 PM | Feedback (1)

The EchoChamber Software Craftsman Cooperative: A bunch of guys at ElegantCode have announced what they are calling the The Software Craftsman Cooperative. At a very high level, it is hard to see what could possibly be wrong with this: “All members are dedicated to working collaboratively with clients, which means alternative ways of doing business. The Software Craftsman Cooperative members maintain the following values: Working together produces better results than working alone Transparent and collaborative client relationships are healthier than fixed bid contracts Delivering business value does not always mean...; posted @ Thursday, January 14, 2010 9:16 PM | Feedback (0)

There’s nothing wrong with ORM: Rob Conery, apparently bored again, decided to post a rant/whine/something about ORMs, apparently because of something Ayende posted. Apparently. It looks like this is a topic that he’s been thinking about for a while, so maybe Ayende’s semi-flamebait post was just the trigger. I don’t know. Anyway, Rob posted an initial commentary, and then, because he’s a wuss sensitive soul, he deleted it, and posted an edited commentary. I have the initial commentary since my RSS reader grabbed it, and I’m not sure exactly why he deleted it, as opposed to just posting a follow up. I didn’t think it...; posted @ Tuesday, December 29, 2009 7:20 PM | Feedback (8)

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