Software As She’s Developed

How do you verify your component throws an exception? Most tests verify something works. But exceptional cases are important too, and what do many exceptional cases do? Throw exceptions of course. So how do you verify your component throws an exception? Real possibilities My favourite idiom for testing exceptions is: try { […]

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I just finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. Here’s a few notes. Summary The Blink thesis can be summarised thus: * Split-second decisions can be far more accurate than drawn-out, deliberate, “rational”, decisions. * However, split-second decisions can also be heavily flawed. * Interventions can be made to help people harness the power of split-second decisions. Evidence of split-second decisions over deliberate decisions Experiment […]

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Martin Fowler makes some good points about Code As Documentation. It fits in with Scott Ambler’s Agile Documentation text text. In line with those, here’s my summary on documentation and agile development: Doing so obviously benefits the code base: Self-documenting code means the code base is easier understood. This delivers value by making the […]

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The thing I like most about flickr is not its openness or RSS support or community features. They’re all great, but the thing I like most is its lack of handholding. This, to me, is the thing that differentiates it from older sites like Yahoo. It treats its users as being a bit savvy. Not […]

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Flickr’s search is flawed: it over-emphasises tags and breaks the golden rule of a search box on each page. I like Flickr’s innovation. It’s definitely a candidate for the “2.0″ world and a big reason for the Yahoo acquisition is probably just so they can rack Flcikr brains as we enter this brave new WWW. If […]

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CSS Rounded Box Generator (applause Raible). Rounded edges often waste a lot of time, with artists having to hand-code them. A tool like this helps creative types focus their efforts where it matters.

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Daniel Steinberg: There are patterns within and among patterns for many of the original GoF design patterns … A striking example is described in the latest column from Robert C. Martin’s Principles, Patterns, and Practices series: The Factory Pattern. In it he shows that “Abstract Factory is just Strategy used for creating objects.” Yes, the […]

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I incur at least the following spam types: Comment Spam So I disallowed comments. I’m hoping the next stable WordPress upgrade will help to fix it; otherwise, I’d be tempted to add a “I’m a human” checkbutton. Trackback Spam Apparently, there is some hunger for a worthwhile online casino among readers of this blog. I need to […]

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Coding Horror lists prices for TextPad replacements: # UltraEdit - $40 # EditPlus - $30 # EditPad Pro - $40 # TextPad - $32 # EmEditor - $40 # NoteTab Pro - $20 My obligatory reaction: Vim - priceless Portable, Powerful, Programmable. Smart IDEs are great, but there’s always a need to edit plain text files, e.g. config files on a server, and documents too. […]

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Lasse comments on podcast music: The Vision Thing and Software As She’s Developed so far represent the majority of my experience with podcasts. I have to ask, what’s with the corny intros and loud music? Otherwise, I love being able to “just listen” while cooking or otherwise spacing out a bit. (emphasis mine.) Since […]

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