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I’m an avid believer in testing - TDD helps drive design, and having a test suite available to verify behaviour while maintaining an application is worth a million bucks. Even the most complete unit test suite still doesn’t guarantee that the integration between different components is correct, nor does it test the value a system …
I’ve been playing with Vagrant , an easy way to set up virtual machines for development purposes. Vagrant provides a simple command line interface paired with a setup script (VagrantFile) in Ruby to provision virtual machines , share folders between the host and the virtual machine and to provide port forwarding . I’ve been using it to …
A week ago, I wrote : Sigh, I can’t seem to make up my mind about the platform to host my blog on. You can find my new blog over at <www.riaanhanekom.com>. Will post the details soon over there. This blog will self-destruct in a week or so. My first blog was at Blogger , back when Google just bought it. What pained me then, was the lack …
Git , the distributed source control system is fast becoming the de facto standard, at least in the open source arena. Although it comes with a bit of a learning curve, the advantages of using Git over more traditional SCMs like Subversion and TFS far outweighs the investment of time necessary to learn it.
As developers, we are good at breaking up components into sub-components - sometimes excessively so. When confronted with a larger than average chunk of work, we make a choice: either consider the work as indivisible to be delivered in its entirety, or break it up smaller pieces. Most of us already experience a sense of foreboding when confronted …
I’ve had some interesting discussions on the management of work through user stories. A lot of teams, those starting to use agile techniques, seem to have some uncertainty around common topics: The theory behind story points and why they are preferred over estimations in hours Why story points and velocity are self-correcting measures The …
In a discussion with a former colleague of mine on the organization of components and on system boundaries, we focused on the complexity inherent to software building. It hit me that we can learn from physics here. The law The first law of thermodynamics states that
This post is more than two months late, but I’ve been at DStv Online since November 2011. Intervate has been great to me, and is still on my recommended list of employers. I experienced significant growth there, and I thank them for that - but with consideration of some quality of life issues I’ve been having, and a need to stretch my …
In preparation for my recurring new years resolution of updating this blog, I’ve followed the advice of Simon Cropp and moved my old blog to Posterous .
A “You sure you want to do this?” confirmation when you attempt to run a query that contains a destructive update (delete/update) without a where clause. With the hoards of database tables getting wiped in the world, why hasn’t this been implemented yet? This feature would remove a lot of fear of pressing F5.