Development: General
When To Start Performance Testing
Performance testing is like the forgotten sibling of unit testing…which is often the forgotten sibling of development. However, when systems go live, it is often performance issues, not functional issues, that are the cause of the greatest headaches. How then do we avoid these potentially paralysing and expensive bumps in the road? Performance as a […]
Latest Tech Radar From ThoughtWorks
If you want to know what’s hot and what’s not, the Tech Radar is great reading. The radar is divided into four segments; Techniques, Tools, Platforms and Languages. Each segement is then subdivided into four statues; Adopt, Trial, Assess and Hold with particular products, methodologies, etc categorised in the matrix.
The Agile Manifesto
Re-read the Agile Manifesto and take stock of your methodology There’s times when I like to take a step back away from the coal face and take time to review what I’m doing. It’s easy to lose yourself in the hurly-burly of day-to-day work and lose sight of the more fundamental principles that underpin your work. After […]
Care To Comment?
“Commenting your code is like cleaning your bathroom — you never want to do it, but it really does create a more pleasant experience for you and your guests.” – Ryan Campbell I’ve heard many arguments about commenting code ranging from “Comment Everything!” to “Comment Nothing!” and everything in between. Everyone has their view but the […]
Patience and Respect
Your attitude is the defining aspect of your professionalism. How you approach relations with your colleagues is a significant part of that professionalism. As the old maxim goes, do unto others… This will be a familiar scenario for anyone who’s coded on a project with other developers: You have a task to fix a defect or implement […]
Reasons
Every now and then you stumble upon one of those timeless articles that concisely describes some universal aspect of the human condition. I’m always delighted when I find such an article that relates directly to my line of work, especially when it offers great practical advice. This piece by Gerald Weinberg from 2006 is a […]
Cloud Java
The Register has posted an excellent article regarding Oracle’s Java roadmap, criticising the perceived lack of support for Cloud services. While rightly pointing out that Java as a language has many built-in features that are cloud-friendly, it goes on to say there are many APIs missing. Of course, these are all produced by lively third […]
Facebook Proxy Lunacy
What looks like a simple, elegant solution on paper may not be so simple and elegant when you have to live with it. I have recently been looking at a service that purports to allow companies to expose their e-commerce platform to Facebook users. The idea is that the service provider acts a proxy for requests […]
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