I’ve just read James Bach’s new book, Secrets of a Buccaneer-Scholar: How Self-Education and the Pursuit of Passion Can Lead to a Lifetime of Success. It’s available now as an e-book, and will be released in September 2009 in hardcover. It’s easy to digest at 141 pages long, but it still gives us a lot [...]
In a posting about unit testing a few months ago (Real unit tests, and bugs that go THWACK), I talked about Michael Feathers’ rules for unit tests, from page 12 in Working Effectively with Legacy Code. He also has a 2005 blog posting about it (A Set of Unit Testing Rules), where he added one [...]
Jason Gorman again inspires me to write, in response to his post Freelancers Are People Too. He says that most people who write code for a living are freelancers. That’s an interesting statistic, and if it’s true, I would be curious to see a source for it.
What really got me thinking was his story about [...]
Jason Gorman posted about “The Future Of TDD - Real-Time Feedback As You Type?” on his blog. He says that unit tests should give us feedback as fast as the feedback he got when dropping his security badge -
“On my way back from lunch today, I was walking down the stairs when I heard a [...]
I’m developing a suite of subsystem-level tests for a client. I was delighted to receive this message from a developer on the project:
I seem to be more motivated by seeing tests pass than by closing things on my bug list :-)
We talked about the how the tests seem to function as positive reinforcement, while bug [...]
I am speaking at the August 2nd meeting of the Dallas/Fort Worth Unix Users Group at 7:00pm. The talk is titled “Everything is UNIX - Adventures in Cross-Platform Tooling” - I’ll be sharing several stories about creating tools that work on multiple operating systems.
To people who know UNIX, most modern operating systems are similar. Even [...]
Hot off the presses is Brian Marick’s new book Everyday Scripting with Ruby: for Teams, Testers, and You. Though I couldn’t convince Brian to name the book something like “Scripting for Toolsmiths,” the buzz around the net frequently recommends the book to toolsmiths.
Before I get further into my review, I should confess that I’m really [...]
When I first started using OpenSTA for performance testing last year, I had the luxury of spending a few days with a consultant more experienced with OpenSTA and performance testing in general (thanks, Jeff!). I was more experienced with reliability, robustness, and stress testing, which have different expectations for reporting test results than performance testing. [...]
When I need to send a document to someone, I always have to ponder which file format to use. For millions of people, there is no conscious decision - they fire up Microsoft Word and send a .doc file, assuming that the recipient has Word installed. Often this is a safe assumption. But I personally [...]
Is the vacation message a thing of the past? I used to set up an autoresponder when I left the office for more than one business day, so people would know I wouldn’t be able to respond right away. But now I don’t bother, because when a vacation message is sent in response to spam, [...]