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 […]

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 that the documentation you find is nearly always out of date (boo!).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 […]

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 […]