In any battle between the source code and the documentation, the documentation always loses. Note that this is not the same thing as the source code winning.
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Author: Robert Watkins
My name is Robert Watkins. I am a software developer and have been for over 20 years now. I currently work for people, but my opinions here are in no way endorsed by them (which is cool; their opinions aren’t endorsed by me either). My main professional interests are in Java development, using Agile methods, with a historical focus on building web based applications. I’m also a Mac-fan and love my iPhone, which I’m currently learning how to code for.
I live and work in Brisbane, Australia, but I grew up in the Northern Territory, and still find Brisbane too cold (after 22 years here). I’m married, with two children and one cat. My politics are socialist in tendency, my religious affiliation is atheist (aka “none of the above”), my attitude is condescending and my moral standing is lying down.
US health care law stands up
See the NY Times article for details
As a non-American, this is purely spectator sport for me, but it’s still interesting.
Some comments (below the fold):
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Thoughts on the new Podcast app for iOS
Inspired by reading this article over at ZeroDistraction.com
While I don’t actually care about many of the features the author cares about (e.g. I prefer to do podcast discovery on my laptop), I do agree that the app feels clunky.
Update: Podcasts listened to using this app don’t get recognised as ‘played’ back in iTunes. Presumably that will get fixed with an iTunes update with iOS 6, but still… that’s the nail in the coffin for me. I won’t be using this app again until iOS6 is out proper.
Update the second: Heck, even after I manually updated the played status in iTunes, the Podcast app didn’t swap out the played episodes for unplayed. It did bring down new podcasts – but not new episodes.
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AiL – Simplest JBehave Scenario
In the last segment, I managed to get JBehave reporting under Maven using a pre-canned example. This time, I want to tackle the other extreme – I want to develop a single story in JBehave and see what’s the bare minimum it takes to get it running, inside an IDE (in my case, Eclipse)/
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Newman government to slash solar feed-in rebate
So the Newman government, in its latest attack on anything sensible, is slashing the feed-in rebate for solar power – from 44c a kilowatt/hour to a mere 8c kw/hr. This is an absolutely insane idea – crazy crazy crazy stuff.
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Non-religious grow in Australia
Cool. 2011 Census results are out! I love Census data – it’s always so interesting.
As a militant atheist, though, the first thing I checked out was the religious affiliation breakdown. Great news: we’re continuing our advance.
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AIL – JBehave Trader Example, standalone.
JBehave comes with some very comprehensive examples, so I thought I’d start there to see if I could get one of them building – and reporting – under Maven. The example I chose was the ‘trader‘ example, which you can see at github.
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Adventures in Learning… JBehave
A couple of years ago, I got the ‘specification-by-example’ bug. I was playing with this new project called Cucumber, and was really enjoying the idea of specifying examples in an English-like syntax that testers and BAs could supposedly read. (I say supposedly, because it never really took on at my previous place-of-employment. Which was a shame). Nonetheless, I enjoyed it, and advocated it when and where I could. Heck, if nothing else, it was an excuse to write support code in Ruby as a break from the Java stuff.
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Administrivia – Commenting issues
As an attempt to keep blog-spam under control, I require anyone commenting to leave a name and email address. I don’t care if they are real or valid – it just helps fend off the bots.
I don’t require you to be logged in to anything in order to post comments. However, it turns out that WordPress do (I host this on wordpress.com). If you try to comment using an email address associated with a WordPress.com account, and you aren’t logged in to that, then WordPress will ask you to log in.
This is not something I can turn off, unfortunately – part of the price of a hosted solution. 😦
If you see this, the easiest thing to do is use a fake email address. Add something like ‘-nologin’ to the end of you username (e.g. ‘joe-nologin@example.org’) – I can trim that off later when approving comments if you ask.
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Junior Developers considered harmful.
In my last post, I mentioned that the biggest reason for producing shit code (in my opinion, anyway) is that we let junior developers run around unsupervised. That’s worth expanding on.
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Software is too expensive to build cheaply.... 