Norman RichardsI want my two dollarsCode generation isn't evil- (Found July 8, 2008 ) One man's trash is another man's treasure. This weekend I've been working on an article on code generation for The ServerSide. (hopefully I'll get it wrapped up tonight) The goal of the article is to make the case that code generation isn't evil. To the contrary it's a very legitimate, and often overlooked, development technique. I'll save the arguments for the article, but I do want to leave one point out their for the code generation doubters. Don't think that because the examples..http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/code_generation_is_good.html Scrumdiddlyumptious- (Found July 8, 2008 ) We are starting a new round of development at work tomorrow and it looks like we are going agile. (hopefully that's not like going postal) My only real exposure to this style of development is through the Addison-Wesley eXtreme series. But, the lucky methodology isn't extreme programming, it's scrum. Besides having seen the scrum book at a local bookstore, I really don't have any idea what to expect. I was tempted to go read the book this weekend or at least do some investigation on the.http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/scrum1.html First impressions of scrum- (Found July 8, 2008 ) I mentioned a few days ago that we've adopted scrum as our development process. Until this week I didn't really know much about it. (and I still don't) Scrum shares a lot with other agile methodologies like extreme programming. There is a focus on quick 30 day iterations (called sprints) which are bigger in focus than XP iterations but not really by much. The goal is to always deliver a working product with features lists (the backlog) based on customer input. Scrum doesn't dictate...http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/scrum_starting.html eXtremely disappointed in scrum- (Found July 8, 2008 ) I thought scrum was supposed an agile process, but after being a week in the scrum, I want out. I really am trying to keep an open mind, but I seem to be spending much more time than I used to worrying about process. We have daily meetings in the morning where we all have to estimate our hour and tasks and basically give a status update. This takes 15-30 minutes of time that I could be using to actually do my work. What is worse is that to have anything interesting to say that early in.http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/bad_scrum.html Use cases are not requirements- (Found July 8, 2008 ) Rick Lutowski gave the technotizer at this months AustinJUG and talked a bit about the "Freedom" Service-Oriented Methodology. I'll talk about Freedom at some other point, because, frankly, I'm not exactly sure I understand it. Nonetheless, Rick said one thing that caught my attention. Use cases are not requirements. Rick compared designing an application to designing the dashboard of a car. Use cases are to the application design what a drivers ed manual is dashboard design. They both.http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/usecase_requirements.html Friends don't let friends write singletons- (Found July 8, 2008 ) The question of singleton or static class reminds me that it's time for another rant against the evil that is the singleton anti-pattern. I don't have a problem with the points made, instead I want to again ask why one would ever use a singleton. Well, because you want to make sure only one instance of an object exists in the system, silly. But why Why should anyone ever care to enforce a rule that only one instance can exist in the system I've yet to see a compelling example of a...http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/no_singletons.html SQL is horrible- (Found July 8, 2008 ) Jack Herrington writes: "I'm still appalled at how engineers with five years of experience are telling me that SQL is horrible and should be hidden or ideally replaced." I've got 10 years of experience programming, and I'll say it. SQL is horrible. Actually, it's SQL as much as it is relational databases. Relational database do have their strong points, and if you need a solid transactional datastore you don't have that many options. But, I think relational databases really should...http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/no_sql.html Averting the coming brace war- (Found July 8, 2008 ) I too am worried about the coming brace war. Given that the new-liners can't accept the obvious flaws in their brace style, the only alternative to all out war is to alter the languages to eliminate braces or disallow the heretical usages. Tcl was an interesting player in the move to eliminate incorrect bracing. Tcl was line oriented, so braces had to be placed on the same line to cause the Tcl interpreter to parse correctly. proc test for set i 0 $i This was nice..http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/brace_war.html Embracing good formatting- (Found July 8, 2008 ) I've already chimed in on the relgious issue of braces, but these comments motivated me to describe my brace philosophy. You should always write code that is the clearest to parse visually. I think newline braces make the code less readable when the preceding line is a single line statement. For example: if (test) doSomething(); is more readable than: if (test) doSomething(); The opening brace doesn't doesn't do anything but imbalance the structure of the code...http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/more_braces.html topcoder kata- (Found July 8, 2008 ) I've been watching Dave's code kata's with a good bit of interest. I taught myself programming (20 years ago on a commodore vic 20) by thinking up small little programming challenges and trying to solve them. Of course, it took a while before I could really do interesting. In middle school, I finally mastered the breakout kata (bouncing a ball around the screen and knocking out blocks) and the calculating pi kata. (using '4 - 43 + 45 - 47 + ...') Part of the fun of the last one was...http://members.capmac.org/~orb/blog.cgi/tech/coding/topcoder_kata.html |