12 Lessons I learned from Unit Tests/TDD is a great article for practically adding TDD to your teams rhythm. I can’t stress enough how much point 8 makes a difference: Pair programming helps the team to adopt TDD. When we are trying TDD for the first time or when our deadline is tight, we will have the will to forget the tests and write only production code. Pair programming will prevent the team to cut corners and will keep it writing tests. ...
Yesterday, one of my inter-web buddies IM’d me and asked if I had used Typhoeus before. I said yes, so he asked me if it was possible to follow redirects using it. He said he google’d it and nothing turned up. I sharply responded, “LOOK AT THE CODE!”. We had some banter back and forth and a few minutes later he was automatically following redirects. It seems these days that developers often think if something does not turn up in a google search, it does not exist. ...
A study showed that people distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQs. What's the impact of a 10-point drop? The same as losing a night of sleep. More than twice the effect of smoking marijuana.Doing several things at once is a trick we play on ourselves, thinking we're getting more done. In reality, our productivity goes down by as much as 40%. We don't actually multitask. We switch-task, rapidly shifting from one thing to another, interrupting ourselves unproductively, and losing time in the process. ...
9GAG - Making an iPad stand from its own packaging. Geeky and efficient. Couldn’t resist.
A good software tester… Constantly asks, “What is the best test I can execute right now”. Can log unambiguous bugs with clear repro steps that make the main problem obvious with few words. Is not distracted by their understanding of developer decisions. Just because the tester may understand certain technology constraints motivating dev solutions, the tester’s mission is never to defend the AUT see my post, What We Can Learn From Dumb Testers. It is to communicate how the AUT currently works, in areas that matter right now. via Test This Blog - Eric Jacobson's Software Testing Blog: Who Is A Good Tester?.
Peepcode has a blog and it is managed in a very efficient and unique way. Everything is checked into git and pushed, no database involved–it’s kindof incredible. Check out the stack here: About this Blog | Free PeepCode Blog.
When you’re discussing efficiency, a lot of what comes up is the details. There is something to be said for the “beauty” of limitation and the “efficiency” of beautiful things–especially the efficiency of our brains processing it. A talk about the Zen of Python, monkey patching (several times), the Ruby community's reckless hastiness, the syntax of RSpec and cucumber, beauty and ugliness in languages and testing tools, the complexity of the languages' grammars, syntactic vs. semantic complexity, the relative taste of grasshoppers and tree bark, etc., etc. Python vs. Ruby: A Battle to The Death from Gary Bernhardt on Vimeo. ...
Nothing is simply black or white. Old Worlders are particularly sensitive to certain things that are simply non-issues to New Worlders. We learned about computers from the inside out. Many of us became interested in computers because they were hackable, open, and without restrictions. We worry that these New World devices are stifling the next generation of programmers. But can anyone point to evidence that that’s really happening? I don’t know about you, but I see more people carrying handheld computers than at any point in history. If even a small percentage of them are interested in “what makes this thing tick?” then we’ve got quite a few new programmers in the pipeline. ...
Upgrading applications is good sport and all, but everyone knows that greenfielding is where the real fun is. At least, I love greenfielding stuff a lot more than dealing with old ghetto cruft that has 1,900 test failures and 300 errors, 20,000 line controllers, and code that I’m pretty sure is actually a demon-brand of PHP. Building a totally new app in Rails 3 is relatively simple especially if you’ve done it in previous Rails versions, but there a few changes that can trip you up. In the interest of not missing a step someone may need, this post is a simple walkthrough of building a new app with Rails 3. ...
While the Python version may not be quite as pretty, nothing about them screams “Ruby has much stronger capabilities here”. Instead, by using examples like Sinatra, Rubyists trade in an argument about great semantic power for one about superficial beauty. Rubyists, Pythonistas and others working on web development share a common language in JavaScript. When describing blocks to “outsiders” who share a common knowledge of JavaScript, we tend to point at JavaScript functions as a close analogue. Unfortunately, this only furthers the confusion. ...