Wednesday, June 04, 2008

Setting Coding Practices

Let's face it, anyone that has worked in development for any length of time will know that there is always change, and the "quality" of the code is a key area where this change is seen.

When you start on a project, you're not too familiar with the technology, you're not familiar with the problem space and you have a lot to learn. So you code in a certain way, and you use particular techniques to achieve your goals in code. Over time you learn better techniques, but the problem is you don't retrofit your old code to use the new techniques.

Recently I had to work on code that was written right at the beginning of my current project. Wow! Was it legacy.

This change and development is a good thing in the sense that it is a sign that things are improving, however it presents a challenge in that developers are very good copy cats. They will typically do things the way they see them done (even if that way is wrong) and don't as a rule go against that. In a sense that is also a good thing because we don't want a group of cowboys all doing their own thing.

The challenge is how do we accept this change and improvement, allow for it and even encourage it, and at the same time communicate the best practice approach to doing things. Furthermore, at some point we need to limit improvements (there's always trade offs), because any change that is made, needs to be tested. In our code base we still have all the various ways that things have been done from the beginning until now. When you have a project that has been going for two years, this is inevitable.

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

The Continuous Integration Game!

If you use hudson, then you really should take a look at the CI game plugin. It's actually hilarious!

It stems from an idea originally (I think) by Daren Cummins described here.

The way the game works in hudson is that you get points according to your build activity. Plus points if you do something positive, like check in on a successful builds and minus points if you do something negative, like checkin to break a build.

Other examples of ways to score (or not) are if you change test failure/success, add or remove code checking violations (checkstyle, pmd etc).

It's been a great source of humour and a little bit or rivalry amongst our devs. Obviously you can't read too much into it, because it's easy to game, but it has added some value.

The plugin home page is here.

Firefox 3 Rocks!

If you haven't downloading and are using firefox 3 you are missing out BIG time.

It is unbelievably fast - the whole browsing experience is super fast, and the javascript engine is about about 5 - 10 X faster. Even faster than Opera's.

The memory leak issues have also been fixed. With 17 tabs open, Task manager reports 237 Megs Used. I don't think I could have functioned with 17 tabs with firefox 2.

How important is the programming language?

  Python, typescript, java, kotlin, C#, .net… Which is your technology of choice? Which one are you currently working in and which do you wa...