Andy Dent's Weblog
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=andydent
Artima Weblogs is a community of bloggers posting on a wide range of topics of interest to software developers.
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A Lesson in Design and Community Consultation
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=306487
Komodo IDE version 6 radically changed the design of one of the key aspects of what makes it an IDE, not just an editor - Projects. There have been a lot of unhappy comments from the user community. How much consultation should a company provide?
Do Career Plans for Developers Actually Damage an Organisation?
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=293287
Your HR department may be very proud of their career planning publications but does the organisation actually benefit from forcing developers to consider their career?
Why Learn New Languages? Being Outlived by C++
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=268226
Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career.
The Adventures of a Pythonista in Rubyland/2 - No Comprehension
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240826
Trying to do some simple file processing and strip blank lines, Andy stumbles through the "Ruby is supposed to feel natural" approach and just tries things. The conclusion - Python list comprehensions are still more flexible and powerful than any Ruby feature and inject is possibly the most misleadingly named function I've ever encountered.
The Adventures of a Pythonista in Rubyland/1
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240319
Inspired by the Adventures of a Pythonista in Schemeland series and being engaged in my own learning experience, here's the start of a series by a language geek with about 18 years of OO development experience, trying to get to the heart of Ruby.
Unit Testing Frameworks - When to Abandon or Migrate?
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=240268
A large body of unit tests as a regression test system is important to many organizations. What do you do when your framework of choice dies or is neglected? When is it time to move on and how do you budget for abandoning or rewriting tests? Have you ever thought about being caught by this situation?
Estimate Archaeology - Unearthing Effort from a Repository
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=239828
An attempt to answer the question - given 1 million lines of code in the repository (i.e. SVN), is there some rule of thumb as to the number of developers we have to keep on staff just to maintain those 1 million lines of code?
Ruby vs Python for Code Generation and Flippin' Templates
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=220174
Ruby is the cool new kid of on the block and has some significant cred in code-generation circles. Python has whitespace sensitivities that make it a poorer fit for templating solutions. This sounds like a no-brainer decision but is the real argument about which language the market wants to see used?
The Why Diarize Song
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=218195
A shower song to remind me why it's useful to write down alternatives and reasoning.
Open-book Interviews with Googling as a Skill
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208868
Would you hire a programmer who insisted on working things out or using APIs solely from memory? If we expect people to be able to quickly research things on the web as part of the programming, why not include that in interviews? Is search efficiency a skill that should be on your resume?
Issues, ThoughtChunks, Variations and Requirements Traceability
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=189510
Everything I'm doing seems to be about small chunks of thought. These chunks need tracking, comparing, versions controlling and melding into presentations of varying narrative richness.
The interesting projects and interested parties include software engineers, publishers and academics but there's no killer app in sight?
ROAring Confusion over Finding Services
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=189208
In which Andy suffers an extreme bout of cynical disbelief in the merits of Resource Oriented Architecture and "solving" the discovery problem by giving up and just having a description as part of a "Resource".
Roadmaps vs Architectures
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=187239
How do you develop a Roadmap for a broad-ranging community, encompassing several service-oriented architectures? Here are some ideas.
Resigning as a Guru - Low-effort Documentation
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=180637
How do you transfer knowledge about a system in an optimal way, without forever being the 'guy who knows'? What practices will help you exit gracefully? Or, even if you aren't leaving this area of the project, how do you lessen the documentation burden?
User Experience - Decrease Stress, Increase Joy
http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=174969
There are two kinds of software experience you want for your end users - Invisibility and Smile on My Face.