Note: this is a technical post, to help poor souls that google this
When using nose on Solaris machines, simply running nosetests without specifying the file names will not work if you are the root user. To fix this, you must either not be root, or pass nose the argument –exe. That’s it.
Gory details: [...]

Coders are the worst customers ever. The sooner you wrap your head around that, the better. Actually, any customer that’s technical is a bad customer, but nothing trumps coders. That fact is not intuitive, or at least wasn’t for me, but it can be really painful to find it out by yourself. So here, I [...]

Aren’t you sick of wasting your time, your team’s time and precious build cycles for finding the stupidest mistakes ever? I know I’m far more interested in solving the real problems at hand than chasing stupid syntax errors. And even if you don’t mind, you really shouldn’t let your teammates substitute for a decent tool.
Up [...]

As coders, we should always strive to get as much feedback as soon as possible. Agile tells us we should get frequent feedback from our customers in order to make sure we’re always on track. Unit testing and the green-bar loving are all about knowing exactly when your code breaks and when you’re safe.
A kind [...]

I’ve just finished reading Kent Beck’s TDD by Example, and man, what a great reading that was. It was so good, I’m gonna put it in my top 10 books list (accompanied by other classics, like The Pragmatic Programmer and Beck’s probably most known book, Extreme Programming Explained).
I’ve been doing TDD (to an extent, say at least [...]

I read a post today by Kent Beck:
The prices for programming have fallen so far that just programming for someone isn’t going to meet my financial goals (4 kids to get through college). For my own satisfaction I need to program but to meet my goals I need to do something more than “just” programming.
This [...]

We’ve been working on creating a scalable and stable building and testing environment for our team.
After some checking, BuildBot was found to be the best (for our needs, at least).
Gathering the different abilities that are needed for testing our products, and the different limitations we’ve got in our testing lab, we came to the conclusion [...]

Soon, I will be leaving my workplace for the past 3.5+ years, and that has got me to do some retrospective. One thing I’ve been reflecting on is how good programmers seem to move towards better programming/working habits that are shown to them and how easy it can be sometimes to make a difference.
On August, [...]

Our team has recently received a brand new 50′ plasma display. After some brainstorming we’ve decided we want to display on it a live dashboard that will be used for all sorts of stuff – an information radiator about current projects, displaying online information from production systems, pulling snapshots from different web-cams in our organization [...]

Recently, a new guy has joined my team and is in the process of taking over one of the systems that’s currently in my control. The guy, as most of the other people in my workplace, is the product of the organization’s own “Java School” (“WHY?”, you’re yelling to yourself? That has to do with [...]