“The Anatomy of a Whale“: A nice write up on problem-finding and -solving within a large-scale operation.

http://www.palfrader.org/code2html/code2html.html

Mockito – The New Mock Framework on the Block:

• I haven’t used it (yet), but the whole Test Spy concept (as being a half-way point between stubs and mocks) is very interesting
• I’m actually going to forward this around work a bit to see if this is easier for people to swallow, because EasyMock is being choked on (because it’s so heavy) by some of our developers.
• Here’s the home page for Mockito

Post-Redirect-Get:

• I haven’t been doing a lot of front-end work lately, but this article on Wikipedia discusses a pattern that we were sorely lacking at my last gig.

The capture-recapture code inspection:

• I haven’t yet found the right set of words to convince an employer that systemic organization-wide code reviews are a Good Thing, but I’d like to submit this article as another point of reference in the code-review effort.

Ajax testing with Selenium using waitForCondition:

• Here’s a helpful bit about using Selenium to test AJAX apps

Tom Brady on Software Management:

• I gotta say that one of the most powerful ways of showing me that my efforts are needed is when my employer seems thirsty for my code. At my current job, I put in a weekend working on a pet, side-ish project… And when I got back the next week, it was already planned to get used. That is the kind of substantive feedback (more than talk) that makes me feel needed and appreciated.

Urgency is poisonous:

• Interesting… Now that I am working in a startup, it seems like we are always just on the edge of being late or behind the curve. I wonder what a 4-day work week would look like, considering I usually do about 5.5 or more work days a week…

Use your singletons wisely:

• This is really good advice.
• I think it’s funny, but I’ve had fewer and fewer inclinations to create a Singleton since I’ve been getting so involved with Spring.

JSONVid: Pure JavaScript Video Player:

• Ooh! An alternative to Flash for video in a browser?!? It’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

I found this blog post to be really helpful… (I just copied and pasted the command-line script, and it just ran and installed fine!)

Compiling Git for Mac OS X Leopard (10.5)

WOW! This article is fantastic! I was so psyched after reading this article that I even sent it to my Luddite-ish mother. (After printing the article out and reading it, she said it was ‘cute’ and reminded her of me… <sigh!>)

I have so much to say about this article, it will probably come out all jumbled… But I hope the reader will be able to pull out some salient points.

Participation

In the vein of where I am going with my ruminations I had actually named this blog post "Participation Culture" before re-reading the article and seeing that "Tim" (O’Reilly, I’m assuming.) has some concept called an "architecture of participation".

Participation has been a big theme in my life in recent years. About 6 year ago I fell in with the Burning Man community, whose 10 Principles specifically address participation as a founding pillar. A little over a year ago, I came to the Bay Area and was immediately impressed by all the Makers, teachers, and BarCampers. (As I write this, I am impressed that I continually fall in love with ideas that are only a degree or two away from Tim O’Reilly…)

History of the Participatory Audience

While reading the "Gin, Television, and Social Surplus" article, you might be lulled into thinking that audience’s radical demand for participation’ is an artifact of recent past. Then I got to thinking about the history of our culture’s move towards encouraging participation and how little bits of interactivity have made themselves known before the current incarnation of internet culture.

Yeah, I agree magicians have been pulling people up on stage forever, but this doesn’t count. These types of stage shows are more of an exercise in social engineering than in interactivity.

But, think back to the late-70′s. There was a very persistent subsection of our culture who were not willing to sit back and passively watch a show. These people, considered "crazy" by some, would don fishnets and garters and high heels and feather boas to go to a theater to throw bread and yell at the screen and sing along to the music, and some of these people even tromped right up to the front of the theaters to re-enacted exactly what was happening up on the screen at the exact same time. There were, and still are, entire communities built around the pomp and circumstance of late-night showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show".

It tickles me pink that Dr. Frankenfurter, the "sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania", could be a material ancestor for every tweet I Twitter or every Yelp review I post in this "participatory internet".

Epilogue

The Dr. Frankenfurter bit from above is about where I wanted to end up for this post. However, in writing it, I came up with a couple more links for events or shows that I think are incredibly relevant to the article above or to the rest of this post.

One of the first shows I ever saw that took a fun step out of the passive-audience experience was the Blue Man Group. My family went to one of their shows in Boston during Christmas time, and I was blown away! At the end of the show, they start unrolling streamers off of toilet paper rollers, covering the audience, getting them to move the streamers forward while strobe lights flash and loudly blaring techno music surrounds you. You are covered and involved in a moving black-lit sea of white streamer paper. I have a distinct memory of jamming out in my seat, looking to my right with the biggest grin on my face and seeing my grandmother get all tangled up in the streamers as they were moving forward. It was a sensory overload, but still one of my most fun memories from my teen years.

I dabbled a little bit in Dungeons and Dragons but it never really ‘stuck’ with me. However, I don’t think anyone can debate that it totally serves as the ancestor of the phenomenon described in the above article as ‘sitting in your basement and pretending to be an elf’.

Since I’ve been in San Francisco, I have totally fallen in love with The Extra-Action Marching Band. Though the Blue Man Group involves the audience at the end of the show, Extra-Action not only breaks, but DEMOLISHES the fourth wall. Through an incredible alchemy of sounds, sweat, and audacity they involve the audience as an integral part of the show. (Disclaimer: not for the claustrophobic.) To friends, I have described the experience of being right up in the front row as being in a mosh pit without any of the anger.

• This side-by-side and step-by-step look at Groovy totally makes my mouth water. I’ve really been getting tired of all the boilerplate BS in Java, and Groovy looks to be the lightweight way to combat it!

"Groovy-power automated builds with Gant"

• Since I’m looking into Groovy, why not look into Gant as well?!?
• Java builds could DEFINITELY use some help!
• One point of contention: the author says this several times: "Groovy has a steep learning curve for Java developers — meaning that we can actually pick it up quite quickly." (Mr. Author, you keep on using that phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means…)

"The Grinder, a Java Load Testing Framework"

• Since I’m on an alternative-JVM language kick, why not consider The Grinder, which uses Jython?

"Making Agile Reviews Effective"

• I know, I know… But since I’ve been on such a pro-Code Review kick lately, I thought I’d share an article that identifies some Code Review anti-patterns.

• This was the original article, from whence I found all the others in this post.

This 5-part series outlines some great suggestions:

1. – "Three rules for database work"
2. – "The Baseline"
3. – "Change Scripts"
4. – "Views, Stored Procedures and the Like"
5. – "Branching and Merging"

" SSW Rules to Better SQL Server Databases"

• These hints have some SQLServer specifics, but many of thm can be looked at with DB-agnostic lenses.

• This reminds me of the saying "Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can barely hear what you are saying."

• Martin Fowler asks "Are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?"

The Years of Experience Myth

• Everyone’s heard of the posting asking for 5-8 years of Java experience when Java was only 3 years old, right?

The Immutable Laws of Web Design and Development

• Ignoring these laws always comes back to bite ya…!

Pure CSS 3D Boxes

• My designer coworkers loved this…
• They dissected the code to figure out the diagonal lines. It turns out the ‘secret sauce’ is a 20-pixel border with a different colors on horizontal versus the vertical. It seems the border bevels itself when given these parameters.

• Ooooooh, #10! Even web designers are getting on the "testing bandwagon". YAY!

The Most Favoritest Icon

• To me, this story represents an allegory about the importance of good monitoring of incoming URLs.
• This reminds me of a story in "Release It!" (Chapter 7) where a newly deployed site was brought down by all the ‘bots’ in the open web that were hitting old (and deprecated) URLs. The session load brought by handling all those requests killed their servers.

• Ahhh… A great example of how listening to ‘bean counters’ encourages short-term thinking.

How to recognise a good programmer:

• I like this post… Hopefully it is true, and not just an example of why I think I’m a good programmer.

How To Interview A Manager:

• Good points. I gotta keep this link around for the future.

Ten Thousand Hours of Design Reviews:

• WOW! Mathematica has undergone about 10,000 hours worth of design reviews.

Dishonest Programming:

• A couple of good examples of how code can be very misleading, and tips on how to avoid the same in your code.

Whatever happened to code reviews?:

• My answer: short-sighted-ness.
• Another thing to think about when working in an environment where there are no code reviews: How are the developers going to grow? If I come in, and day-to-day just keep dropping the same code that I’ve been dropping, with no one challenging my skills, how am I going to get any better? My personal answer is that I spend out-of-work time pursuing "recreational programming" activities, however I realize that I am the exception to the rule. Most of my peers stagnate, frustrating my growth. And how can "management" ever hope to make any better products than what they’ve had in the past? The answer seems to be "churn": lose engineers and hope that your next hire will be better than the one departing.

The top 4 things you should never do to your users:

• I shopped this one around my office for a bit, since we are definitely treading on at least 2 of these. And 100% of the responses were along the lines of "But there is a company benefit to it." This makes me ruminate on the difference between a "service organization" and other types of companies.

The 3 Levels of Programmers: The Good, The Bad, and the Lazy:

• I believe I fall *firmly* into the middle tier, though I try to tread into the upper tier every once in a while.
• I wish it wasn’t impolite to just run out of the room screaming when someone suggests a "lets-build-it-ourselves" approach.

Why Crunch Mode Doesn’t Work:

• I think "crunch mode" and "incentive pay" are two concepts that should be discarded.

Maybe I’m just grouchy today, but I am struck by how many companies embrace short-term thinking, even though they purport to be thinking of long-term goals.

Joel’s Talk at Yale: Part 1 of 3:

• "This seems like a kind of brutal example, but nonetheless, this search for the holy grail of program quality is leading a lot of people to a lot of dead ends. The Windows Vista team at Microsoft is a case in point. Apparently—and this is all based on blog rumors and innuendo—Microsoft has had a long term policy of eliminating all software testers who don’t know how to write code, replacing them with what they call SDETs, Software Development Engineers in Test, programmers who write automated testing scripts. The old testers at Microsoft checked lots of things: they checked if fonts were consistent and legible, they checked that the location of controls on dialog boxes was reasonable and neatly aligned, they checked whether the screen flickered when you did things, they looked at how the UI flowed, they considered how easy the software was to use, how consistent the wording was, they worried about performance, they checked the spelling and grammar of all the error messages, and they spent a lot of time making sure that the user interface was consistent from one part of the product to another, because a consistent user interface is easier to use than an inconsistent one."
• This bit reminds me that we need to look at some of the non-technical benefits of having non-technical testers. (This is something that I have been challenged with in the past.) Now, I’m not advocating getting rid of automated testing, but there is an undeniable benefit to having actual people actually poke your software.
• "Currently, in the battle between the geeks and the suits, the suits are winning, because they control the budget…"
• This quote echo’s something that I’ve seen in my career as of late. Adopting some of Joel’s language: There is a continuum between the suits and the geeks, with the suits wanting to rush stuff out the door and the geeks striving for high-quality code purity. In every business there are judgments and compromises to be made, but it is my job as a geek to make sure my projects land in the middle of the continuum by representing the code purity side. If I did not do my job we would be left with quickly delivering a lot of buggy code. I am the geek Yin to the suits’ Yang.

Is Quality Negotiable?:

• Mirroring what I said above about the "suit vs. geek, quick vs. quality" continuum, this article helps to point out that contention in many instances.

• Wow!
• This is such a great "dissection" of me, that I am almost embarrassed.

• This is an amazing article!
• The author moves from cell phones in impoverished regions to political censorship to the social network of humanity to network resilience to SF’s Free Net Project to humanity as a mob to filesharing to future prognostications. He covers a lot of ground, but I was enthralled throughout the whole article. So many good points!

• This post brings up my suspicion that the terms "unit testing" and "integration testing" may be a bit harmful. I prefer to think of them as "single-layer testing" and "double-layer testing". (Maybe I’ll make a post about this concept in the future…?)

" TDD with Acceptance Tests and Unit Tests"

• The best quote in this whole post: "Manual testing is immoral."
• I like these delineations: Developers are responsible for writing unit tests and writing code to match the acceptance tests. QA is responsible for writing the acceptance tests, and exploratory testing. (As my current PM likes to say "A good QA tester has a shit-finger.")

"Welcome to the Shitty Code Support Group"

• I linked to the same post that Ted is talking about: "Confessions of a Terrible Programmer"
• Even in Java, I agree that Static Analysis tools (FindBugs, PMD and CPD, CheckStyle, JDepend, and JavaNCSS) are really useful. Though my management is not yet convinced, I find that paying attention to these reports gives me a great cross-project view of quality, and allows me to apply coding diligence to some of the code hot-spots.
• I love Ted’s Declaration of Anti-Perfectionism: "I am human, therefore I make mistakes. If I make mistakes, then I cannot assume that I will write code that has no mistakes. If I cannot write code that has no mistakes, then I must assume that mistakes are rampant within the code. If mistakes are rampant within the code, then I must find them. But because I make mistakes, then I must also assume that I make mistakes trying to identify the mistakes in the code. Therefore, I will seek the best support I can find in helping me find the mistakes in my code."

"They Write the Right Stuff"

• Coding for NASA. I really admire their quality, but I have tried to steer my career to avoid writing code that could kill someone.

"So Long Apple. The Party’s Over"

• I thought I was going to upgrade to Leopard on my home machine, but I can’t risk Java5 getting broken.
• (Besides, I already use offsite hosted SVN to back up my important stuff already. And TimeMachine was my biggest draw…)

JavaScript Self-Education:
http://blog.mootools.net/2007/6/5/help-i-dont-know-javascript

A FANTASTIC WTF…
http://forums.worsethanfailure.com/forums/thread/133345.aspx