There’s been a lot of talk lately about how agile dev practices are hurting more than they’re helping. People complain that things like unit testing, TDD, CI, pairing, and code reviews limit developer creativity and create unnecessary work. This is of course ironic since agile processes emerged precisely because people felt that non-agile processes which […]
It’s really difficult to choose a small number of favorite talks from TED’s vast collections, but for whatever reason I decided to try. For those who don’t know, TED is a conference (conferences actually) which gives people a platform to talk about whatever they wish in 20 minutes or less. The only requirement is that […]
Safari Books Online just released a new version of their iPad app, Safari To Go and I, for one, was very interested to try it. There are two reasons for my interest in Safari To Go. First, I’m a big fan of Safari’s subscription-based book service and of iPads. So, an app that combines the two is highly […]
JavaScript is lingua franca of the internet. It’s everywhere, it’s important, and it’s not going away. Yet a lot of devs who use JavaScript don’t understand it well at all. It’s certainly not for a lack of resources. In fact, there are many great resources on the internets for learning JavaScript. There are also great […]
The goal of every software team is to get the finished product to the end customer. Yet doing this is surprisingly hard for many teams. In a perfect world, the act of deploying software to production is painless and trustworthy. To know whether you do in fact live in such a world, try answering the following question: can anyone […]
Among the gajillions of apps for the iPad, there are some real gems. Here’s a rundown of my favorite productivity apps. Enjoy! Noteshelf (iTunes link) I’ve tried quite a few note taking apps for the iPad, and Noteshelf really stands out. It’s simple to use, has a great Zoom-to-write feature, and syncs to Evernote! I […]
Microsoft held its annual web development focused conference MIX in Las Vegas last week. Although Windows Phone development was the hot topic, there were also a number of great talks on web development topics (especially JavaScript). I’ve compiled a list of the most interesting ones to me. Enjoy! JavaScript: The Language Great talk from Luke […]
To create functional tests for your web applications, you need data in your database. The crucial thing about this test data is that it should be stable. Otherwise, your tests are not deterministic and that makes them useless. For example, if your test uses an Employee record with ID = 100 and Name = “Bob Smith”, you […]
All good devs know that your source code should be in source control. There are many reasons for this, but one of the most important ones is the ability to rebuild and deploy your entire application whenever you want. Database artifacts (tables, views, triggers, stored procs, etc) are an integral part of the application and […]
Very few things in technology impress me more than web applications which are able to massively scale. The ability to serve up gagillions of requests to bajillions of users in milliseconds is nothing short of amazing. And, for whatever reason, I’ve always had the impression that the software it takes to run massive web sites is […]
Recently, I ran across a test someone wrote to verify functionality offered by a 3rd party framework. This didn’t seem right and here’s why. When you write a test, you’re basically saying the following: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. With this test, I am making it known that the software I wrote (or […]