Simplicity over Complexity

Having read at least one and a half of Richard Monson-Haefel’s tomes I’m impressed that that he’s come around to the painful complexity that is J2EE:

Over the years however, EJB and its super set, J2EE, became increasingly complex until there was so much information it was difficult if not impossible to swallow. Today I’m a recovering J2EE developer; I’ve successfully regurgitated the massive J2EE bolus that slowed me down and made me mentally lethargic.

As an analyst for the Burton Group at least he can point out the potential faults of vendor driven highly complex standards like WS-*. Now if only we came across more skeptics at places like Gartner.

Rails with Rake test_performance Task

In a bid to have more fun, I’m hacking my way through the later parts of Agile Web Development with Rails (1st Edition). I added in the admittedly simplistic performance test of adding 100 orders to the database. Just to be a bit anal I wanted to add a Rake task for it as well.

I’m still pretty much in squid/newbie mode with Rake, but by adding the following 4 lines of code to in lib/tasks/performance.rake I was able to successfully create a test_performance task:

desc "Run performance tests"
Rake::TestTask.new("test_performance") { |test|
  test.pattern = 'test/performance/*_test.rb'
}

Then a simple

1
rake test_performance

runs the performance tests.

Design Patterns Study Group

Sometimes you really get a sense that things are going well from your staff. Today was one of those days.

I’ve been sending some of my more senior developers to conferences with the plan to expand their vision of software development. Sort of you don’t know what you don’t know until you’re exposed to it.

Coming back from one of those conferences one tech lead got very excited about design patterns. It took a while since he had quite a workload, but he just helped run a 3 hour session with another developer introducing design patterns and covering Strategy and Factory Method.

The initial session went off pretty well. They’ll probably refactor the format a bit, possibly going to more of a study group versus lecture/lab style, but it is immensely satisfying to watch people grow the team.

Making Things Fun Again

Every so often, work just seems like, well just work. At that point motivation goes down the tubes and you’re just slogging through. Drawn out architecture discussions on the benefits of paranoid security got me to a very un-fun state. Bad enough when you’re a solo developer, but even worse if you’re a software development manager and your mood is likely to rub off on the whole team.

Maybe it’s time to inject some fun courtesy of some Cruisecontrol powered lava lamps.

Ruby Coding Styles

I’ve been absorbing standard Ruby style by osmosis, but I did finally stumble across an actual style guide including one specific to Rails. We use The Elements of Java Style for our java code at the office and it works pretty well. I like the comment:

There is no place in Ruby where lowerCamelCase is ever used.

I’m guessing that was specifically for us Java guys. Of course it’s a wiki page so that comment may not survive forever.