Tea-Driven Development

If you think it’s got a bit quiet here on the blog, there are two reasons for that. One: my current project is very very nearly ready for the next round of beta invites, which has keeping me extremely busy. More details on that soon.

Second, though, is that I have well and truly caught the twitter bug. If you haven’t tried it yet, I really suggest you give it a go. It’s a great way to engage in conversations, and it somehow breaks down barriers very effectively, possibly better than any electronic medium I’ve played with yet.

See you over there? http://twitter.com/mattwynne

> Bletchley Park, the codebreaking centre that helped to win the Second World War and launch the modern computer, is in danger of irreparable decay unless the Government steps in to save it.

What can you do?

• Sign the petition
• Visit the campaign website
• Come to Extreme Tuesday Club’s next meeting to find out more.

I bring you good news and bad news, dear reader.

The bad news is that it looks as if my present client may be running out of interesting work for me to do, for the time being, which is a real shame as I’m greatly enjoying working there.

The good news though is that this means I’m now available for hire again! If you need an experienced, charismatic programmer, technical architect or coach to join or lead a team of programmers, and you’re serious about that team producing high-quality code that delivers maximum value to its users and enjoying it as they do so, then I think it’s time we had a little chat.

Read more here: http://mattwynne.net/work/cv/programmer/

I just came across this post from Kevin Lim about a cool new tool for the (Apple-based) Safari browser called SafariStand.

A bit like HistoryHound, this plug-in allows you to quickly search your browser history, review it as thumbnails, and has a killer, iTunes-style cover-flow view of your history called History Flow:



Like Kevin, I’m still not satisfied with this, and would like to see something more like TrailBlazer, that allows me to visualise my browsing history as paths and branches.

Ideally I’d also like this data to be shared so I can socialise with other people who hang out on the same bits of the internet as I do.

Maybe it’s time to dig out that firefox extension tutorial again..?

So I got to SPA yesterday afternoon, but this is my first day proper.

The sessions are longer than at other conferences I’ve been to, which allows for more depth. I’ve been to three today: – Code Debt (Workshop) – Is Software Practice Advancing? (Panel Discussion) – Real Options (Workshop)

The evening is ensuing with more BoF sessions, so there’s no rest!

Continue Reading »

Hmph. I just discovered Markdown which makes a great partner to the TextMate Blogging Bundle, but my recent markdown-formatted posts don’t seem to be appearing on the homepage of my blog…

Anyone know what’s going on?

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 three mindless bastard clicks, that I want to use the name/path from trunk.

Do the people who wrote this thing use it themselves? How do they sleep at night?

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 lines of code and execution cycles in a large app if used wisely.

One trick we use is to replace all those silly asp:LinkButton tags with a good ole anchor tag, and a call to a special utility class called LinkBuilder which knows how the site’s URLs hang together, like so:

<a href="<%= LinkBuilder.Show(catalogueItem) %>">Cancel</a>

This sort of markup can hardly be acused of being spaghetti code (the LinkBuilder method has a single line inside it), and means that we avoid what you might call ‘spaghetti execution’ when you actually come to spin the thing up.

Think about what a sequence diagram of the equivalent use of an asp:LinkButton with a wired OnClick event would look like. Eugh.