There’s a Sale at Praggys!
November 27th 2008
If you’re looking for a book or two about software development, check this out…
Archive for the ‘Development’ Category
New Gig
November 6th 2008
This is my first week at Academic Management Systems. We write software that helps universities manage their medical programs.
We’re a Ruby on Rails shop. My 6 year run as a .Net developer is over for now. I still like .Net. I still think .Net is a good platform. I see myself working with .Net again sometime in the future.
I’m also, however, very excited to step away from MS technology and to try out some new stuff. Although I am using Ubuntu for my workstation (I’m just not that interested in working on a Mac.).
I work with a good group of people and I’m looking forward to writing some cool software.
REST is Gathering Support
April 19th 2008
Udi Dahan, an active enterprise software community member, posted a great podcast on using Rest for large scale projects.
Here’s my summary:
- Most of the on-line REST examples focus on simple active record, crud-ish systems. The resources are things like Customer, Catalog, Catalog item, Order, etc.
- Business operations can be treated as resources too. Transfer balance, Sunset product, Change name just happen to be resources that affect more than one entity. The classic Transfer balance operation, for example, affects two bank accounts. The transfer balance operation itself, however, has its own attributes such as transfer initiation date, transfer initiator, transfer approver (perhaps), etc.
- RESTful HTTP GETs leverage the extensive caching infrastructure that the Web is built upon.
Does this mean that every large system should be RESTful? No. Does this mean that REST deserves serious consideration when designing SOA based systems? Absolutely yes.
At the end of the podcast, he mentions his concern for a lack of REST service description tools. The community is working on this. Check out WADL for details.
So, ah, How Do You Do It?
February 9th 2008
I’m a fan of InfoQ. The site has some neat presentations on system architectures; a couple of the names might be familiar 
- eBay
- Yahoo!
- SOA and ESB (an interesting argument for avoiding vendor ESB frameworks)
C#’s Syntatic Sugar gets a Little Spicy
January 30th 2008
So far I’ve bought into the “All of C# 3.0’s new language features are just syntatic sugar” view. Today I realized that this sugar has some kick to it.
If Lambda Functions are syntatic sugar, then Expression Trees are habanero peppers.
A lambda function is a new way to declare an anonymous delegate, which is effectively a function pointer. Lambda functions are compiled into executable code.
Expression Trees are data structures that contain descriptions of lambda functions. They convert your code into data. Somewhere down the road in your application a block of code will call Compile() on the expression tree to get a reference to the lambda function and then call Invoke() to execute the lambda.
I found these articles helped me understand Expression Trees:
Expression trees are used heavily by Linq and Linq to Sql. It’s important to understand Expression Trees if you want to develop your own Linq IQueryProvider, which is not a trivial task!
CodeMash 2008 Day 2
January 15th 2008
Concurrency: Past and Present
Brian Goetz
Brian’s keynote on the challenges of concurrent programming was very interesting. Brian was the most intense of the three keynote speakers.
Shared, mutable state is the root of all evil when it comes to concurrency. Languages like Erlang solve this problem by not supporting mutable data structures. Erlang’s syntax, however, is cryptic and not very readable. Object/functional hybrid languages like Scala and F# try to give the best of both worlds.
In C# or Java, you can make your code more concurrent by designing immutable objects whenever possible.
Introducing Behaviour-Driven Development
Andy Glover
Andy masterfully engaged the audience in his session. He started off with an intro to jbehave. If you’re a .Net developer, nbehave is the C# equivalent. He then moved on to easyb, a story driven development framework that Andy is building.
Amazon.com Code Ninja Challenge Part 2
The second challenge was coded in Java, so it was easier for me to follow than the first. The function recursively calculated the greatest common factor (GCF) for two numbers. I could describe what the function was doing, but I couldn’t remember that it was called GCF. After going back and forth for 10 minutes, the Amazon.com guys guided me towards the answer. They gave me an “A” for effort and I received my second Code Ninja badge.
Jim Weirich apparently solved the problem in 20 seconds!
DSLs in Static and Dynamic Languages
Neal Ford
My ninja training caused me to miss the beginning of Neal’s presentation. When I walked in, he was demonstrating how to develop an internal DSL using Java. He then implemented the same DSL in Groovy, and then in Ruby. You could see the line noise decrease as he changed languages. Neal is a huge Ruby fan. He believes Ruby is the best language out there for creating an internal DSL (internal vs. external dsl courtesy of Martin Fowler).
RESTful Web Services
Dave Donaldson
Dave was a decent presenter. The session, however, was geared towards REST newbies. I’ve been playing with RESTful services for a few months now and I’m pretty comfortable with the basics. Dave also spent a little too much time on HTTP and SOAP basics and not enough time on REST. For those who are new to Web Services, however, the intro to HTTP and SOAP may have been just right.
This was the last session I planned on staying for. I decided to leave early and start the 250 mile drive home.
Final Thoughts
CodeMash 2008 was totally worth it. I made a few new friends and I’ve got two areas to focus on in 2008
- Improve my TDD discipline
- Learn more about Scala or F# (haven’t decided which one yet)
I absolutely plan on attending CodeMash 2009!
CodeMash 2008 Day 1
January 14th 2008
OpenSpaces Conferences
Bruce Eckel
Bruce discussed the OpenSpaces conference technique. With this technique, the attendees determine the session schedule and topics. Kind of a like an in-person wiki. CodeMash 2008 had an OpenSpaces track. I didn’t attend any OpenSpaces sessions as my schedule was filled with traditional sessions.
Software Engineering & Polyglot Programming
Neal Ford
Neal’s presentations were, by far, the most thought provoking. He’s an excellent presenter whose subtle humor makes his talks very entertaining.
Polyglot programming means developing multi-lingual software. Anyone who has developed a sql backed asp.net web app is most likely a polyglot programmer because you would have used
sql + c# / vb.net + html + javascript
Polyglot programming is about using the right language for the right problem.
Neal also presented a comparison of software engineering to traditional engineering.
The final output of a traditional engineering project is a set of drawings. Those drawings are the input into the manufacturing process. In traditional engineering, the design process is iterative, creative, and difficult to pin down to a schedule. The manufacturing process is very expensive.
The final output of software engineering project is the source code. As with traditional engineering, the design process is iterative, creative, and difficult to pin down. The manufacturing process, compilation and deployment, is incredibly cheap.
He contends that the primary tools of software developers are languages, not IDE’s. He also states the the engineering rigor for software development is automated testing.
The critical importance of automated testing was one of the primary themes of the conference.
Testing Mandatory
Joe O’Brien
Joe is a Ruby guy, so his session was focused on testing in Ruby.
Joe described an interesting technique for improving your unit testing habit and for learning a language’s api. He suggests writing unit tests against the language’s api.
Say, for example, you’re learning about the .Net String class. You could write a test like this:
[TestMethod]
public void TestStringTrimming()
{ Assert.AreEqual<string>("Trimmed", " Trimmed ".Trim()); }
If you’re using Ruby and RSpec, your test could look like this:
describe String do
it "should remove leading/trailing whitespace when you call strip" do
"Trimmed" == " Trimmed ".strip
end
end
Joe also may an interesting point on code coverage. With Ruby, he goes for 100% code coverage. It’s achievable because of Ruby’s flexibility. He wouldn’t try to get 100% coverage with C# or Java because the some things are just too hard to do, such as testing private methods.
FlexMock: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Objects
Robert Stevenson
I have to say that this was the weakest session I attended. Robert used wild west metaphors heavily in his presentation. I’m not a fan of westerns, so the metaphors didn’t keep my interest. It’s obviously not Robert’s fault that he picked a metaphor that I’m not interested in.
In his presentation he shared a quote from Martin Fowler stating that stub objects and mock objects serve very different purposes. However, when he demonstrated FlexMock, he didn’t highlight these differences. His session ended 30 minutes early. It would have been nice if he used that extra time to emphasize the difference between stubbing and mocking.
Mashing it up with IIS 7
Scott Hanselman
Scott gave the funniest presentation; a mockumentary about how great he was. The keynote audience was roaring with laughter. It was a great post lunch pick me up.
IIS 7 seems very impressive. Microsoft really seems to be embracing the polyglot programming world that we’re entering. Scott’s demo had a couple of technical difficulties, but overall it was a very nice presentation.
Surviving & Prospering as a Computer Industry Consultant
John Stout
John Stout is the founder of Stout Systems. His presentation was focused on marketing techniques for independent software developers. This was a vendor session, which meant he only had 30 minutes. That didn’t leave much time for details. None the less, I liked how CodeMash tried to mix business sessions into the technical sessions.
Applied Service-Oriented Architecture
Brian Prince
Brian gave a good presentation on SOA. His presentation didn’t contain much new material, but it was well organized.
Advanced Ruby Design
Jim Weirich
Jim Weirich is an excellent presenter. He’s also one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He presented real world problems he had to solve and the advanced Ruby techniques he used to solve them. He was quite good at getting the audience involved.
This presentation by Dave Thomas is another good source for advanced Ruby programming techniques (Dave Thomas wasn’t at CodeMash, but I thought this was a good place to put the link).
Amazon.com Code Ninja Challenge Part 1
Amazon.com had a booth at CodeMash and they are hiring. They posted a couple of code snippets on an easel, asking the attendees to explain what the code snippets did. The first snippet was a recursive function that took a list of strings as input. It prepends the string”Ninja” to each member of the list, unless the member was “Ninja”, in which case it changes the member to “”. I had to ask what language the snippet was written in. The snippet was in Perl, which shows what little experience I have with Perl. I was still able to give the answer they were looking for. I was rewarded with an Amazon.com Ninja Coder sticker. They were doing actual interviews right there, but the the jobs were in Seattle. I think it would be neat to work for Amazon.com, but not neat enough to move across the country.
Overall, I enjoyed my first full day at CodeMash. So far it’s been worth the investment.
CodeMash Day 0 => Expert’s Panel
January 10th 2008
I’m here at CodeMash 2008 in Sandusky, Ohio. The first event was a Q&A session titled
Technology for Humans: Selling Your Ideas, Products, and Services
The panelists were:
All the panelists are consultants who work for or own small IT consulting shops. The advice from the panelists distilled into two main themes:
- Sell solutions and value, not technologies. There may be times when a Client wants you to use a specific technology for political or other reasons. The panelists recommended understanding why before agreeing to use it.
- Do not get into a “Battle of Costs” because you will lose, especially on “commodity like” projects. All panelists shared experiences where they walked away from a potential Client because the Client’s only focus was cost. In their experience, those types of projects are best suited for shops that outsource the programming to low cost markets.
The session reaffirmed the critical success factors that I’ve heard about, read about, and experienced first hand. Even though the session didn’t reveal “anything new”, it was nice to see that the fundamentals of good consulting remain the same.
CodeMash 2008
January 7th 2008
I’m heading out to CodeMash 2008 this week. I’m looking forward to spending a couple of days with a bunch of people much smarter than I. The conference center is supposed to have great wireless connectivity. As long as the meeting rooms have enough power outlets, I’ll blog after each session. Otherwise, I’ll blog until my battery dies 
For those who haven’t decided, there is still time to register. Here’s the session list and schedule.
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Welcome!
