Nelz' Blog
Ruminations on Development
Links - Users
"I Repeat: Do Not Listen to Your Users"
- This reminds me of the saying "Your actions are speaking so loudly, I can barely hear what you are saying."
Posted at 04:22PM Feb 28, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
More Code Review Ruminations
So, I am a big fan of team-wide education. I've even helped to establish a 'Lunch & Learn' program at my current company.
However, I am starting to view this kind of education as a shotgun-style approach. Yeah, you're gonna present a bunch of information that may help a coworker sometime in the future, or it may open their mind a bit... However the effects are scattered. Some people will pick up on specifics and minutiae, others will pull down the broad themes, others may be DBA's and others might be designers.
Conversely, code reviews can act as the sniper rifle in contrast to the team-learning shotgun approach. A developer will get the specific feedback that will affect the code that they recently wrote. This is the difference between a practical exercise and an academic one.
All in all, I am more and more convinced that in a development organization of more than 3 or 4 developers, a formalized code review process is likely to be a big benefit.
Related post: Code Reviews Considered Harmful .
Posted at 02:18PM Feb 15, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in General | Comments[0]
Links - Hiring, Eye Candy, and Immutable Truth
- Martin Fowler asks "Are more expensive programmers actually cheaper?"
- 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...!
- 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.
Posted at 11:52AM Feb 13, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[1]
Links - Testing and Monitoring
10 Principles Of Effective Web Design
- Ooooooh, #10! Even web designers are getting on the "testing bandwagon". YAY!
- 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.
Posted at 01:32PM Feb 12, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Links - Code Review Comedy and RegEx Evangelism
Posted at 02:41PM Feb 06, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in Links | Comments[0]
Resuscitating Links
I was going through my work email yesterday, and found a lot of links I had circulated there. Pardon if there are duplicates to previous posts, there are too many to go back through the blog posts...
- A tutorial on character code issues
- Java and UTF-8 encoding
- How to spot the dreaded non-coding architect
- Flip
- I think this would be a useful tool or technique to demonstrate a couple of aspects of your application. Just write a script that 'flips' your resource bundle(s), and apply to your app(s). Now, you know if your app appropriately handles UTF-8 character encoding, you can see what is not internationalized, and you will be able to tell which of your automated tests are explicitly dependent on text strings.
- PMD: Automated source code analysis and bug detection
- A Library of Topics from around the Web on scaling websites
- One of my favorite presentations on scalability
- Enough With The Rainbow Tables: What You Need To Know About Secure Password Schemes
- Testing Will Challenge Your Conventions
- Java Spec: Measures and Units
- w00t!
- Making the Most of Java 5.0: Enum Tricks
- Continuous Integration anti-patterns
Wow! That was a mouthful!
Posted at 10:27AM Feb 06, 2008 by Nelson "Nelz" Carpentier in General | Comments[0]