Musings of a Software Development Manager

I came across Ruby Conventions for Java Programmers a while back, but still fairly helpful. Every language has its own idioms.

Joel Spolsky argues recently somewhat tongue in cheek that Java just isn’t a good language to differentiate potential programmer candidates. At a high level I can agree with the sentiment that you want to know that someone knows more than Java.
On the idea of weeding people out I can’t say that his focus on [...]

I have a defacto rule I try to follow with resource allocation. For any project beyond simple maintenance I always assign 2+ developers. The reasons are fairly obvious:

At least two developers know the source code.
Each developer is able to bounce ideas off the other one and help work through roadblocks.
It’s hard to develop [...]

Stumbled across this post by Dave Churchville where he argues that J2EE has killed of OOP. I find it pretty close to the truth with the web applications we build. We don’t get to build a whole lot of first class objects. I find many of my developers haven’t grokked OO all [...]

Over the Xmas break I finally freed up enough time to do a shallow dive into Ruby via the Pickaxe book. So far it’s very enjoyable for a variety of reasons.
This is the first completely new language I’ve tried to learn after becoming test infected. It’s nice to do really simple things and [...]

For a while now I’ve seen the following error show up in our Checkstyle reports:
1java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to get class information for DataAccessException
There was a pattern to this where any custom exception couldn’t be looked up. After about 30 minutes of googling about usually just finding people’s checkstyle reports I came across the suggestion to [...]

A developer admitted today, after finally getting back to writing tests, that:
I’m finding a lot of places where we should have checked for nulls in our code.
I may point the developer to the Introduce Null Object Pattern tomorrow since it may avoid having to check for nulls all over the code base. Eventually we’ll [...]

As I’ve mentioned before our adoption of TDD is going slower than I would have anticipated. I’ve actually been religiously posting unit test counts on the wall of my cube for an entire Sprint now and we’ve gone from zero to 39 unit tests in that amount of time. Since that amounts to [...]

I listened to Richard Monson-Haefel’s recent podcast for the Burton Group on rebel platforms. The most shocking statement follows:

If they [your developers] value simplicity you probably want to go with a super platform.

According to the Burton Group:

Super Platforms are: IBM, BEA, SAP, and Microsoft
Rebel Platforms are things like: Hibernate, Spring, Struts, and Tomcat and [...]

It occurred to me today while reading an article about Tiny Basic in the latest Dr. Dobbs that much of my childhood contempt for actual programming may have come from my propensity for syntax errors and the primitive nature of the editors I used back in my childhood.
I’m dyslexic, thus spelling has always been pretty [...]