Category: Software Development

CVS to Subversion Migration – a war story

One of the things that was annoying us at Wotif for some time has been how slow our CVS repository had been getting. Doing a tag after a release, for example, could take up to 15 minutes, CruiseControl was taking up to 45 minutes to do a scan, that sort of thing. Basically, the server … Continue reading “CVS to Subversion Migration – a war story”

One of the things that was annoying us at Wotif for some time has been how slow our CVS repository had been getting. Doing a tag after a release, for example, could take up to 15 minutes, CruiseControl was taking up to 45 minutes to do a scan, that sort of thing. Basically, the server we were using was almost literally having the hard disks melt… a 4GB CVS repository was being hammered almost continually. So, we finally bit the bullet a few weeks ago, and moved to Subversion, and I thought I’d share the experience.

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CruiseControl != Continuous Integration

We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting at “Wotif”:http://www.wotif.com/AboutCareersPositionDetails.jsp?jobId=7 recently, so I’ve been doing a lot of resume skimming and interviews of late. And I’ve noticed, amongst many other things, statements like this: “Oh, yes, we did continuous integration; we used CruiseControl!” Folks, using “CruiseControl”:http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net is not continuous integration. And that’s coming from a former … Continue reading “CruiseControl != Continuous Integration”

We’ve been doing a lot of recruiting at “Wotif”:http://www.wotif.com/AboutCareersPositionDetails.jsp?jobId=7 recently, so I’ve been doing a lot of resume skimming and interviews of late. And I’ve noticed, amongst many other things, statements like this: “Oh, yes, we did continuous integration; we used CruiseControl!”

Folks, using “CruiseControl”:http://cruisecontrol.sourceforge.net is not continuous integration. And that’s coming from a former committer on the CruiseControl project.

Continue reading “CruiseControl != Continuous Integration”

How not to handle exceptions from static code block in Java

Saw a “post at taragana.com”:http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-handle-exceptions-from-static-code-block-in-java on “How To Handle Exceptions From Static Code Block in Java”. It came down to advocating logging it and rethrowing a runtime exception which would “normally ends the program execution”. Sorry, but I couldn’t let this piece of extremely bad advice slide…

Saw a “post at taragana.com”:http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-handle-exceptions-from-static-code-block-in-java on “How To Handle Exceptions From Static Code Block in Java”. It came down to advocating logging it and rethrowing a runtime exception which would “normally ends the program execution”. Sorry, but I couldn’t let this piece of extremely bad advice slide…

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Broken abstractions => broken code

I’ve just received another powerful lesson in this simple concept. When you break your abstractions, it invariably leads to broken code.

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Misleading headlines – don’t you love them?

The Australian IT on Tuesday had a “lovely article”:http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18994350%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html?from=rss on the Trellis system rollout in WA – specifically, how it was a “Big Java Job [that was] blasted on blowout”. The implication, of course, was that Java was to blame.

The Australian IT on Tuesday had a “lovely article”:http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,18994350%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html?from=rss on the Trellis system rollout in WA – specifically, how it was a “Big Java Job [that was] blasted on blowout”. The implication, of course, was that Java was to blame.

Continue reading “Misleading headlines – don’t you love them?”

*rofl*

Wot “Jeffrey said”:http://www.developertesting.com/archives/month200604/20060430-MockingASingleton.html. I’ll never be afraid to mock a singleton again.

Wot “Jeffrey said”:http://www.developertesting.com/archives/month200604/20060430-MockingASingleton.html.

I’ll never be afraid to mock a singleton again.

Estimation vs planning

One thing that I get sick of is how people take an estimate, expect it to be accurate, feed it into a plan, and when the plan is (inevitably) proven wrong, blame the estimate. This is a fallacy from the era of Waterfall development, but it still lingers on in many Agile environments.

One thing that I get sick of is how people take an estimate, expect it to be accurate, feed it into a plan, and when the plan is (inevitably) proven wrong, blame the estimate. This is a fallacy from the era of Waterfall development, but it still lingers on in many Agile environments.

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FasterFox – time your pages

I noticed today a little timer at the bottom of a co-worker’s browser, showing him how long the web page he was browsing took to load. This tool just became a part of my standard toolkit – the “Fasterfox extension to Firefox”:http://fasterfox.mozdev.org

I noticed today a little timer at the bottom of a co-worker’s browser, showing him how long the web page he was browsing took to load. This tool just became a part of my standard toolkit – the “Fasterfox extension to Firefox”:http://fasterfox.mozdev.org

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Wow… Free Visual Studio versions – still

Looks like MS is “making VS Studio Express free as in beer”:http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/04/20/free_visual_studio/ permanently. I wrote up my responses to the free beta “some time back”:https://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/06/wow_free_visual.html; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, _and_ it’s driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and … Continue reading “Wow… Free Visual Studio versions – still”

Looks like MS is “making VS Studio Express free as in beer”:http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2006/04/20/free_visual_studio/ permanently.

I wrote up my responses to the free beta “some time back”:https://twasink.net/blog/archives/2004/06/wow_free_visual.html; like I said then, I think this is a really good move for Microsoft, _and_ it’s driven by the quality of the free IDEs for other languages (notably NetBeans and Eclipse for Java).

Joel on Development Abstraction

“Joel’s”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he’s talking about. His latest article, “The Development Abstraction Layer”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.

“Joel’s”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ a pretenious schmuck a lot of the time, but he really does tend to know what he’s talking about. His latest article, “The Development Abstraction Layer”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/DevelopmentAbstraction.html really hits the nail on the head in oh so many way.

Continue reading “Joel on Development Abstraction”