The Code Dump

This is another post in my book reviews series. I finished reading Clean Code a few days ago and loved it. It makes me feel good, seeing my decision to wear the Clean Code wristband a few months ago was a smart one.
After I finished it, I felt a bit weird writing a blog post [...]

I’ve been practicing TDD for a couple of years now, and keep learning all the time.
In the past year I’ve been mainly working on a single project, the longest I’ve worked on a project with TDD. Putting aside how fun it is (TDD saved me quite a few times for me to be sure it’s [...]

Today I had the honor of running a Code Retreat right here in our little country.
A Code Retreat is a concept that was born in the beginning of 2009. It’s a day that consists of a bunch of programmers working in pairs about a problem – a session is 40 minutes long and after each [...]

Having recently finished the amazing PPP book (more here) my code-sense is getting better in putting the finger on the smells in code that make it painful for me to use. This is the story of one of them, in Buildbot.
Disclaimer: Buildbot is a pretty awesome building/continuous integration system that I use and contribute code [...]

Once we got our builds happily running on Buildbot, there’s really no reason not to add coverage since it’s so easy (especially if you get bragging rights over your non-TDDers teammates).
All you have to do is this (code is based on this blog post, with adaptations to work on slaves that don’t share directories with [...]

How often do you get to work along some coding superstar that’s been at it for decades? If you’re anything like me, the answer is “never”. That’s why I’ve recently decided to go after books that are aimed to fill this gap exactly. The latest is “Agile Software Development: Principles, Patterns, and Practices” by the [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]