The stand-up meeting has had quite a lot of attention on my team over the last week. At our last retrospective, it was brought up as a problem that we nearly always had at least one person missing when we started the meeting. Obviously this hampers us reaching the goal of having a rich and […]
Author Archives: Matt
Software as an Art Form
I just came across an article written five years ago by Richard Gabriel proposing a university course run along the lines of his own Master’s in Fine Arts in poetry. The idea evidently gathered some momentum at the time, but now seems to have come to a halt. What a shame. I’ve had an idea […]
Casting with ‘as’ in C#
Anyone else hate this? Doofer doofer = GetWidget(widgetId) as Doofer; Then, somewhere miles away from this innocuous little line, I find that my doofer is unexpectedly null. This is a great way to introduce hard-to-trace bugs, unless of course it’s complimented with guard clauses everywhere to test for nulls, which most of the time means […]
The Path to Greatness – Anyone Got a Map?
I just bumbled into a great post by Raganwald on the subject of certification for professional software developers. It’s something I’ve been giving some thought to lately. I coach my team informally on a daily basis as we work together and more formally at the end of each iteration during our retrospective. I’ve also been […]
Integration Tests – Good or Evil?
As with most stupid questions like this, the answer is “neither”. There are times when integration tests really help, and there are times when they can be a pain in the neck. I was prompted to write this post when a colleague pointed me towards this page on the behaviour-driven wiki, which mentions the disadvantages […]
The Power of a Good Story
When I sat Mike Cohn‘s scrum-master course last year, one of the concepts I learned was the idea of templating all your user stories like this: As a [type of user], I want to [do something useful with the system], so that [reason / motivation for wanting to do it]. I’ve come to realise that […]
Painless RMagick Install for Ruby on Rails
One of the ironies and frustrations I find of working with open-source software is that things are changing so fast (yay!) that the documentation you find is nearly always out of date (boo!). Trying to figure out how to get the rmagick component of the handy file_column rails plug-in to play nice, I came across […]
Nested Controllers and Broken link_to
So my first little rails app is taking it’s baby steps in the wild today, and some users should hit the site over the weekend… Exciting stuff. I’ve written an admin area for the site, and with only a tentative grasp on the whys and wherefores, I’ve copied something I saw in the mephisto source […]
Model-View-Presenter (MVP) Anti-Patterns
As I work with the MVP / Passive View / Humble View pattern more in ASP.NET, I’m gaining an understanding of some common smells or anti-patterns that can happen when you try to implement this pattern and haven’t quite grokked it yet. Some of these are problems I’ve had to pull out of my own […]