Category: Software Development

Expressing Intent vs Duplication

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague this afternoon. It centred around what was more important: expressing intent (which I was advocating) vs. removing duplication.
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Does it really matter if the build is broken?

Andy Marks recently posted a dissection of various categories of build failures. In general, I agree that there are definitely different severities of build failures. The question is: is there a time when a build failure is not important?

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Automated Test Running

A neat little Eclipse plugin I’m playing with at the moment is the Continuous Testing Plugin for Eclipse The basic purpose of this plugin is to run your tests (or a selected subset) as part of the build cycle in Eclipse.
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Estimation Anti-Pattern

Name: Precision Estimation

AntiPattern Problem

Developers continually get asked to provide an estimate with a high degree of accuracy. They are expected to spend a fixed period of time to produce the estimate.

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Moving on – reflections

I’m leaving Suncorp in January, after about 3 years there. I’m taking up a position at wotif.com where I will be joining a small team that drives their website.
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Hibernate named queries rock

I’m now working on my second project with Hibernate, having delivered the first, and I’m playing with some of the features I didn’t have time to figure out last time. And I have to say: named queries rock, big time.

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Interesting article on Smalltalk

I was reading Alan Kay’s Early History of Smalltalk recently. Quite an interesting article.
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Software is too expensive too build cheaply.

That’s the title for my blog, and it’s a philosophy I believe in 100%. Software, like many other areas of life, is not a place to cut corners (at least, certain corners). There are certain expenses you have to be willing to pay if you want a quality product that will stand the test of time; avoiding them simply pushes immediate cost now to bigger nastier costs later.
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Well, at least I’ve answered one question

I figured out why the web app I was trying to build before broken when I used the exported build script. Turns out that you need to run a setup script to get your environment “just right” before running the build.
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I’m not sure exactly why WebLogic Workshop bothers to make things customisable

It just makes things break!!

(Followup at end)
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