Gwaredd Mountain writes:
Microsoft has published empirical data that shows that the process overhead for TDD increases the development effort by 15% – 35%. Despite the many positive benefits from TDD, we cannot possible consider anything that adds an extra 35% effort to produce artefacts the customer will never see as lean. Amazingly, people still try [...]

• 0 Comments

I have a contract that I’m working on that requires I work with rails.  That, in itself, isn’t so bad.  But I think what bothers me most about rails can be summed up in one word: partials. For example, let’s say I have the following:
render :partial => ‘employee’, :collection => @employees
What this means is [...]

• 1 Comment

I had a job interview today, and one of the “challenges” with which I was presented was this: “We own several sites. We would like our user to be able to log into the central site as a subscriber, and then all the other sites will know what permissions that user has.”
The sites are [...]

• 0 Comments

Java is Pass-By-Value, Dammit!
Quite possibly the most important article I’ve ever read, because it finally, finally explains to me what Java’s object-passing model is really all about. I’ve never understood it, and now I do: it’s exactly backwards from pass-by-reference, so it’s exactly backwards from the languages with which I grew up. The [...]

• 0 Comments

I’ve always been a little leery of studies that show that somehow, a bigger monitor equals more productivity.  Well, count me as no longer leery.  I’ve been hacking on a 24″ monitor I bought at a Christmas sale yesterday, and already I’m going along significantly faster than I was before.  For one thing, I can [...]

• 0 Comments

Yes, that’s a signal boost.
I’ve only played with Node.js for about 24 hours now, and I’m already deeply impressed with it. Node.js is something of a holy grail: an implementation of server-side (and desktop) Javascript with a modern engine (Google’s V8), in which all I/O is event-handled. You no longer care about multiplexing, [...]

• 0 Comments

So, I got tired of the way Django-SocialAuth was borked and not working for me, so I forked the project and have put up my own copy at GitHub.
There are three things I noticed about the project right away: First, it forces you to use a broken templating scheme. I haven’t fixed that, but [...]

• 4 Comments

This is part 4 of a series.
So far, we’ve written a basic Django application, written some tests for it, checked everything into a central repository, and then integrated those tests with the Hudson continual integration server.
But Django’s tests run in a kind of pseudo-server mode, with both the tests and the application running inside the [...]

• 0 Comments

For the past few days, this has been bugging the Hell out of me and I finally decided today to knuckle down and figure out how the hell Python decorators-with-arguments work.
Basic Decoration
The basics: A python function takes arguments, performs a task, and returns a value. A decorator takes as its argument a function, [...]

• 3 Comments

Parsing HTML with regex summons tainted souls into the realm of the living.
If you hack HTML for a living, this will make you giggle.  And given that I’ve used regex in my tests to assert the presence of classes and objects in a page, I guess I’m guilty.

• 0 Comments