Over the last two or three weeks, I’ve been learning Ruby. For no other reason than to have another string on my bow. Heard that bows are better that way. Often, the best way to learn is to teach, so I’ve put on a couple of “lunch-n-learn” sessions at work to share my newfound knowledge [...]
Practitioners of any field are prone to wonder what sets the experts apart from the merely competent. At least, I wonder that about software development. So, after much contemplation and general navel gazing, I started to notice a pattern in the professionals I am influenced by. I was drawn to JavaScript by jQuery, a library [...]
I’ve taken a new approach to version control. Now all code is versioned, even that one-shot CSV mangler that won’t ever get used again. Here’s why: It will get used again. Be honest, how many throwaway scripts do you actually throw away? Many of them far outlive what you were expecting You need an out. [...]
I’ve been working on a (soon to be released) iPad app over the last couple of months. This was a little different to my usual diet of web /server side development, but easier to get into than expected. Going through the process was a learning curve. Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know [...]
Where I work, the process of putting out a new version of one of our products is slow. Actually, it’s probably much faster than most places, but we’re Agile with a capital A, and we don’t stand for any kind of cumbersome process. Whenever we make changes, they are subjected to a rigorous quality control [...]
There is a gulf of understanding between knowing the nuts and bolts of a technology and knowing how best to apply it. Recently, I was coding a web interface for the administration of a mobile app (the details aren’t important to this post). The site was built with shiny new semantic HTML5 elements, and styled [...]
I was reading “Three Reasons To Roll Your Own Mocks” by Josh Cheek earlier today. One point, somewhat tangental to the thrust of his argument, stood out to me. “When you make changes, many tests may break. Perhaps you change the name of a method that it invokes on its dependent object. Now you must [...]
I am increasingly aware of the danger of ‘prefactoring’. That is, stewing over the minute details of code design before just getting the thing to work.
I picked up a copy of Clean Code by Bob Martin the other day. Having only read the first few chapters, it’s already making a difference not only in how I code, but my whole attitude toward coding.
I’ve read Hello HTML5 (or as much of it as is finished), and Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive Into HTML5. Time to give this a go… I now have a repository on GitHub for a simple form filling application making use of the local storage and offline application APIs. As of writing, I’m still feeling my [...]