Functional. Elegant. Foolproof. Pick two.

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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 [...]

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Wow, talk about a niche market ready for exploitation.
I was talking a client today, and my first question to her was the first question I try to get most of my clients to answer: “If you don’t do this, if you don’t spend the money and the time, what’s the worst that could happen?”
“The worst [...]

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From the announcements for Rails 3:
The upcoming version 3 of Ruby on Rails will feature a sexy new querying API from ActiveRecord. Here is an example:
User.order(‘users.id DESC’).limit(20).includes(:items)

In other words, Rails is now Django.
Also:

Each application now has it’s own name space, application is started with YourAppName.boot for example, makes interacting with other applications a lot easier.
Rails [...]

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Cheesy law firm website templates are multi-colored, busy, poorly laid-out, and tend to go for light-on-dark themes where the seriousness of the business is emphasized by leather and wood textures, spot lighting, and so forth.
A review of the websites of the largest law firms in the US shows two things: a lot of them don’t [...]

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I’ve been trying to do a design thing every week.  I doodle a lot, and make lots of scratches, and I might show you a few of those, but as a web developer I have to keep my hand into the design side of things.  Recently, the magazine Photoshop User had an article on doing [...]

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This morning, for no reason that I’d care to discuss in public, I needed to rename every file in a directory to the index number of its position in the directory in asciibetical order, and add an extension.
The harmless version of this was:
ls | gawk ‘BEGIN { c = 0; } c += 1 { [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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