Brian Marrrick makes a good point that ‘incremental’ and ‘iterative’ just look and sound way too similar to make the decent brand-names for ‘evil’ and ‘good’ software development practice respectively. Note to self: say ‘incremental assembly’ (boo!) and ‘iterative growth’ (yeah!). The more I think about it, the more I like the growth vs assembly …
Author Archives: Matt
You, Sir, are an Anti-Pattern
Last night in the pub I was introduced to the term ‘corncob’, a label apparently used in some software development circles for a disruptive team member. I’d love to know how on earth that particular word was chosen. I rather dislike this tendency to put people into boxes, as the next obvious step is to …
TFS and Renames
Does it really have to suck quite this badly? I have a trunk branch and a stable branch. When I want to promote a cut of code from trunk to stable, I use ‘merge’, and for every single file in every single folder that’s been renamed in trunk, I have to fucking well confirm, with …
XP Day 2007
…was good fun, and well worth a couple of days off. There’s a mixed crowd – some die-hard extreme programmers, quite a few self-styled (and self-promoting!) ‘coaches’ and a few newbies. The atmosphere was really friendly – you would quite often find yourself sat in one session right next to the person who had been …
Avoid Spaghetti Execution with the Judicious use of Inline Scripting
Rob Conery has kicked up a bit of a stink posting about the use of inline scripting in modern ASP.NET apps. I may post more on this subject when I have time, but I had to just weigh in with my support for disciplined use of this technique, which can save you hundreds of pointless …
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Generics and NMock
Maybe NMock supports this, but I can’t see how. [Update 20/10/2007 – of course it does! See the comments for Aybars and Rob’s solution.] Let’s say I have a dependency of my SUT (system under test). That dependency looks like: public interface IDatabase { void Get<TTypeToFetch> (); } Now in my test, I want to …
Safety in Numbers
How important is it to measure how long something took? Well, so the received wisdom goes, by comparing how long it took you to complete your a task against the estimate you made before starting it, you get an idea of how good your estimate was. So far, so good. But what if your estimate …
Printing Your Todo.txt Lists to Index Cards at the Command Line
Like a few other people, I’m over kGTD. In the first flushes of my infatuation with the way of GTD she was good to me, showed me a few tricks I’d never seen before. We had some good times, syncing away. But my iCal started to fill up with billions of pointles calendars, my projects …
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Web-Based Backup… Via a Trickle
A project I’ve been meaning to do for some time is set up a backup of the crucial folders on my home server to somewhere on the web. Preferably somewhere free, like my existing dreamhost space. What I didn’t really consider is… and I bet you’ve already guessed it, dear reader: the piddly-poor upload speed …
SSH on Cygwin
I’m following Gina Trapani’s outstanding tutorials on lifehacker to get me some of that unix command-line joy on the rusty old windows box in the corner. Note to other linux-naive cygwin users out there. If you want to install the ssh command, look for the package called ‘openssh’. No amount of staring at the packages …