Object Mentor Blog comments

"What is SOA, really?" by Jegan

Thu, 15 May 2008 22:35:36 -0500

Really nice presentation.

"Secure Email with GnuPG" by Fred

Sat, 10 May 2008 15:35:01 -0500

Thank you guys, very much!

"What I've Learned from Master Chef Rino Baglio" by J.Shaffer

Fri, 09 May 2008 00:30:04 -0500

I used to work with Rino a few years ago when he was in Seattle. He made the best food I have ever eaten. I learned alot from just watching him in the kitchen. I regret that we could not have worked together longer and I had learned more from him. He did have secret ingredients. He would sneak them in when you were not looking. Alot was flavor and cooking technique.

"What is SOA, really?" by Usha

Thu, 08 May 2008 19:05:17 -0500

Simply put and a very nice article. As mentioned in one of the comments, it is more of MVC architecture instead of SOA. Will wait for the next series…

"The Founding of the Agile Alliance" by merde

Thu, 08 May 2008 11:49:29 -0500

Thanks for your article, really interesting to hear your views on the alliance.

"What is SOA, really?" by heeru.janweja@gmail.com

Wed, 07 May 2008 17:24:51 -0500

great write-up. the language used is simple and it did not get too technical like a lot of the other presentations. waiting for the next in line, hope it comes out soon.

"The Founding of the Agile Alliance" by Jill

Wed, 07 May 2008 11:32:11 -0500

that was a helpful hint in solving the problem…

"Strongly Typed Languages Considered Dangerous" by rpg gamer

Tue, 06 May 2008 22:39:29 -0500

Some language definitely require more energy, but i guess it’s part of the game. If one was perfect, we would all be using it. I think it’s a great article and i loved reading the discussion that followed, strongly typed languages (well C/C++ for me), sure can be a lot of work some time, we have to play along i guess :)

"Your code is not flat" by Jurgen Appelo

Tue, 06 May 2008 16:32:58 -0500

Brett,

I replied to your article with a post of my own:

The Virtue of Junk Code

“I believe it is time for someone to stand up in defense of millions of developers who cannot seem to get around to clean up their act, or their code.”

Hope you like it! ;)

"Your code is not flat" by Brett L. Schuchert

Tue, 06 May 2008 10:22:59 -0500

You know, I’m not surprised about the open universe thing.

That fingernail thing is a great one! It’s right up there with the 10,000 steps per day (no research on that one, it was an advertising thing by a pedometer manufacturer – in Australia I think) or flowing glass in old windows (installers used to put the thick end on the bottom), etc.

That alone is the source of an article! How do requirements that aren’t real live on? (Or something like that.)

However, I am not depressed by the message – maybe about the universe, but not about code.

It’s life. Everything takes care, love and feeding. You, your partner/spouse, your pets, your friends, your parents, your house, everything.

Then there’s two schools of maintenance (and this is another reoccurring theme):

It’s an event
It’s a process

If it is an event, then there’s no little attention paid to history. At some point, things “happen” and it’s time to have a “refactoring event.” Or it’s time to rewrite the entire code base.

If it is a process, then there’s never a special time. It is continuous.

In a sense, I think of Refactoring (capital R) as an event-based mentality where as refactoring (lower case r) is a process.

Refactoring takes a long time. It needs to be scheduled and planned, there’s never enough time until things are so bad that there’s only time for it.

However, refactoring takes a short time. It needs to be practiced, not scheduled. There’s always enough time because keeping things clean as a process or habit makes working easier, faster and more reliable.

"Your code is not flat" by Morbid

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:02:39 -0500

(Second post attempt.)

Brett, thank you for your article, though it was highly depressing.

I wish someone would write an article that said, “Hey, programmer: it’s ok. Your code’s fine. There are no mounting pressures or decaying skillsets. Relax.”

I suppose they won’t, though.

So I just want to make two off-topic points.

1) Current measurements of receding super-novae suggest that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, leading most cosmologist to presume that the universe is open.

2) Someone told me once that fingernails don’t keep growing after death; instead, the body’s soft tissue dehydrates and shrinks, thus revealing more of the cuticle.

Hmm, now the thought’s just struck me: I wonder what the oldest piece of unchanged but still-used software is? Something like Unix’s ping, for example. Might we be declaring dead software that’s really just evolved to perfection?

"Your code is not flat" by Morbid

Tue, 06 May 2008 05:00:59 -0500

Brett, thank you for your article, though it was highly depressing.

I wish someone would write an article that said, “Hey, programmer: it’s ok. Your code’s fine. There are no mounting pressures or decaying skillsets. Relax.”

I suppose they won’t, though.

So I just want to make two off-topic points.

1) Current measurements of receding super-novae suggest that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, leading most cosmologist to presume that the universe is open.

2) Someone told me once that fingernails don’t keep growing after death; instead, the body’s soft tissue dehydrates and shrinks, thus revealing more of the cuticle.

"Generated Tests and TDD" by subway coupons

Mon, 05 May 2008 09:02:11 -0500

i also interested too

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by tim

Mon, 05 May 2008 00:32:12 -0500

Huh? No graphical indication? You must not have been in diff mode, or you didn’t have syntax enabled. The differences are pretty stark if you have color syntax highlighting turned on, and you have shortcut keys to move between differences.

When I use vimdiff, it collapses the areas where there are no differences. I see a few lines of context, and clearly colored areas of difference (including space changes within a line), and am able to copy changes between the panes pretty easily.

Maybe there needs to be some tutorial here. With screenshots.

" What We Can Learn from the Ojibwe Language" by rv

Sun, 04 May 2008 14:26:45 -0500

Yes, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is at the center of that debate. It has an long history and there’s an interesting digression on that here btw: http://www.alamut.com/subj/artiface/language/sapirWhorf.html

Just as the Ojibwe have a rich vocabulary for describing weather, so do meteorologists using english… so extending the analogy, natural languages are “meta-programmable” and rather than being forced to learn a new language to say something new, we create DSLs for the task.

" What We Can Learn from the Ojibwe Language" by Dean Wampler

Sun, 04 May 2008 12:15:20 -0500

If I remember the interview correctly, most of the weather related terms in Ojibwe were verbs, which sort-of makes sense; you care about what the weather is doing and, by implication, how it will affect the risk and success of the hunt, etc.

The interview reminded me how the pressing issues of daily life appear to drive the evolution of a language to make it straightforward to discuss those issues in sufficiently-rich detail. This happens not only in vocabulary, but also even in grammar (like the number of verb conjugations). On the other hand, languages sometimes throw off inessential complexity. English did this with articles like “the” and “a”; we no longer have gender-specific variants, unlike other Germanic languages, for example.

This debate is related, I think, to the debate over the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which postulates that how we perceive the world is heavily influenced by our language (at least that’s my naive understanding of it…).

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by Lorne

Sun, 04 May 2008 10:49:18 -0500

You can select two files, right click, and select ‘Diff with Vim’. Easy enough???

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by pb

Sun, 04 May 2008 09:31:27 -0500

Just what I want – to type in a stupid command line instead of selecting two file and right clicking to choose diff.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by AqD

Sun, 04 May 2008 01:56:11 -0500

I found it hard to use for large files without the graphical indication of where the differences are…. There are a lot of GUI diffs that are better for the job and I’d use vimdiff only when I’m on console mode.

" What We Can Learn from the Ojibwe Language" by rv

Sat, 03 May 2008 21:30:10 -0500

Your analogy involving Ojibwe reminded me of the “eskimo has N words for snow” myth: http://www.derose.net/steve/guides/snowwords/ http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/7197.ctl

The argument that some computer languages are better at expressing certain things better than others I think is valid; otherwise one language would be good enough for doing everything.

Natural languages, however are a very different beast, maybe because the human mind works at a higher level than just being “turing complete”, or maybe it’s the ghost in the machine. But the argument that one natural language is better at expressing certain things than another has been debated much and the evidence always comes up lacking.

It’s a minor point to make I suppose, since diversity in both computer and natural languages is a good thing, and that’s what’s being argued for here.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by Tim

Sat, 03 May 2008 17:56:08 -0500

If you are on *nix, don’t overlook meld. It’s quite a nice tool also. I just tend to do more work with VIM than not.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by Rob van Eijk

Fri, 02 May 2008 15:31:11 -0500

I discovered merging through gVim. It works like a charm. I use it to keep my dokuwiki main.php up to date when doing updates.

"Clean Code. Whew!" by Aaron

Fri, 02 May 2008 00:05:35 -0500

Looking forward!

When exactly would this book be published?

"The Founding of the Agile Alliance" by Webdesign Hamburg

Thu, 01 May 2008 16:09:10 -0500

Very nice article. I’m an agile developer myself. Keep it up, thanks!

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by David Paxson

Thu, 01 May 2008 13:36:41 -0500

I used VIM’s diff feature to compare/merge a base file along with two branches from it. I also had a three monitor setup with the diff spread across the three monitors.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by kretik

Thu, 01 May 2008 12:08:55 -0500

Unless you’re doing this because you’re running on *nix, there’s no reason not to use WinMerge. It’s light years ahead of vim’s diff functionality.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by Chris Gaal

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:12:42 -0500

I’m an avid Vim user as well, and vimdiff has become an indispensable part of my daily tool kit.

I’d offer two other tips on the topic of using Vim as a diff tool:

- Check out the DirDiff plugin (google “vim dirdiff”). It’s very nice for viewing diffs of directory contents.

- I’ve found it helpful to map Vim’s commonly used diff commands to single keys, and adding in a “zz” command to center the window on the current difference when jumping to the next diff. This allows to you fly though diffs, quickly obtaining/putting changes. I use the following, which uses similar key bindings to Araxis Merge (a tool I used in my pre-Vim life):

nmap <F7> [czz

nmap <F8> ]czz

nmap <F2> do

nmap <F3> dp

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by A Purohit

Thu, 01 May 2008 11:06:55 -0500

I use vim and its diff tool very heavily. I have defined the following shortcuts

nnoremap <Leader>u :diffupdate<cr>

nnoremap <Leader>g :diffget<cr>

nnoremap <Leader>p :diffput<cr>

(my leader is the comma character)

so I can type ,g to get ,p to put diffs (both commands work with respect to the current window) and ,u to refresh the screen. It really speeds things up.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by nicholas a. evans

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:06:47 -0500

I’m an avid vim user, and I often use vimdiff when merging simple changes. But when I’m dealing with conflict resolution, I usually resort to kdiff3, which is available under Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X.

Although I think that meld looks nicer than kdiff3, the UI and workflow of kdiff3 seem the most intuitive to me when dealing with three-way diffs for conflict resolution. And vimdiff is faster and closer to hand than meld when dealing with smaller diff tasks.

"VIM as a Diff/Merge Tool" by Pádraig Brady

Thu, 01 May 2008 09:19:11 -0500

I’ve not liked vimdiff when I tried it. I’ll try again I promise. My current merge tool of choice is meld, which I’ve described here: http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/diffs/

The important thing to note anyway is that using these tools, is infinitely better than merging manually.

"Size Matters" by Internet Marketing Belfast

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:41:23 -0500

Totally agree with your sentiments here. I have been reading through this blog and you make some fantastic comments that many many many more programmers should listen to!

Unfortunately we are the ones picking up the mess!

"Dependency Management: HtmlUnit" by dtolbert

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:04:19 -0500

I can’t thank you enough, you saved me a couple hours of bumbling around with HtmlUnit. I’ve ran into quite an issue involving a Javascript routine that returns a bit of JSON that I can play a bit with to decode into Html. I then wanted to take that Html and create an HtmlPage out if, which I would then in turn parse.

I think I was on the right path. What I believe I was doing wrong was using my existing WebClient object to create the HtmlPage with a StringWebResponse.

I can’t get enough praise to the HtmlUnit library. It truely is a gem and “just works” in most cases.

"Unit Testing C and C++ ... with Ruby and RSpec!" by Nolan Eakins

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 00:42:31 -0500

I’m just about ready to try doing this same thing. The only problem I see is that SWIG may introduce bugs. Not sure if that should be a big worry. I am finding Rake to be helpful to build things.

"Clean Code. Whew!" by TonyB

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:52:30 -0500

Looks good. I have a copy of Agile Principles, Practices and Patterns in C#, which is one of the most readable and clear software books I’ve ever read. In fact it’s the only one I’ve ever finished. I appreciate many of these concepts are cross-language, but will the examples in the new book be oriented towards C#, Java or what?

"Secure Email with GnuPG" by feedogator

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 07:20:27 -0500

thanks ben for the great article

"Secure Email with GnuPG" by wow guild hosting

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 19:17:25 -0500

Secure email, geting a pair key and sending/receiving encrypted messages is all very valuable. Thank you.

"Announcement: Aquarium v0.1.0 - An Aspect-Oriented Programming Toolkit for Ruby" by Hendy Irawan

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:27:51 -0500

Thank you Dean.

With AspectR seemingly stalling, this is a highly respected announcement.

Will be highly appreciated by my project here:

http://www.assembla.com/spaces/ccdd

Thanks!

"Magic Funnel, Part 3: Covey's Miracle" by Mike Polen

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 07:48:34 -0500

I was talking with a friend over Spring Break that had a problem with multiple customers. I didn’t have a good recomendation. Now I do…Magic Funnel.

Thanks, Mike

"Magic Funnel, Part 3: Covey's Miracle" by Greg Mohr

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:34:47 -0500

Apologies for stating the obvious, but I think your quadrants need a mirror. You wrote, “urgent things to the right, and non-urgent on the left,” but the quadrants are shown in reverse along that axis. Petty, I’m sure, and it doesn’t change the value inherent in the idea.

I’ve seen the same 4-box model suggested with different axes (for example, replacing urgency with difficulty). The axes probably need to be flexible to change with the environment, but I think the four quadrant priority scheme is very useful, especially if it exposes anything in quadrant 4.

Ah, you’re right, and I switched it. Thanks.— Tim

"Magic Funnel, Part 3: Covey's Miracle" by Vasco Duarte

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:05:40 -0500

The quadrant idea is quite good to explain the real meaning of priority to stakeholders, however I find that to get them to cooperate on defining the priority (where there’s more than one stakeholder), the pattern described here is also quite good.

"Clean Code. Whew!" by Pete

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:48:08 -0500

Look forward to reading the book and more blog posts!

I have three other books from the Robert C Martin series but none by the man himself. They’re all quite brilliant in their own ways. Working Effectively With Legacy Code, Agile Java and FIT for Software Development. I expect the quality of Clean Code to be similar.

Have you got plans for a paperback edition of Agile Software Development?

"Clean Code. Whew!" by http://www.grayger.com/wp/

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 22:57:25 -0500

I am looking forward to the book, especially chapter “error handling” and “concurrency”. Any sample chapter available?

"What is SOA, really?" by eroch2@yahoo.com

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 10:10:36 -0500

I agree the term SOA is getting abused. Related post (mine).

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/business/archives/what-is-soa-23569

"Secure Email with GnuPG" by iphone hacks

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:57:19 -0500

Worked on my iphone

"Secure Email with GnuPG" by Matt Stronge

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:36:07 -0500

Works like a charm, thanks for the great tip!

"Code is a Liability" by Max Guernsey, III

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 04:26:46 -0500

...so that makes two of us. :)

"Velocity Inflation Triggers Productivity Recession" by Ted M. Young

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 10:47:32 -0500

Nice article, Bob—I love to hear about failures because we can learn much from them. I’m surprised that they were using bug fixes as stories: was this intentional, i.e., they didn’t see these as bugs but just new features? I always treated bugs (i.e., didn’t meet the original story card requirements) as part of the original story’s velocity.

It also makes me wonder how they accepted the stories as being done? Were they done when the code was checked in to the source code control system? When all the tests pass? When QA did some manual testing? When QA’s automated tests passed? When the customer’s acceptance tests passed?

It seems to me that taking credit for stories completed before anyone’s actually tried the feature is just asking for code to be stuffed in to the product and unless the team is really on top of things, is a disaster waiting to happen.

"Clean Code. Whew!" by flipdoubt

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 08:17:28 -0500

Looking forward to it.

One question that has been nagging me lately: I believe I grok the benefit of the SRP, but if all your classes are responsible for just one thing, won’t your software do just one thing? I don’t mean for that to sound overly simplistic. I’m more interested in learning where the best place is to bring all these single responsibilities together to deliver real value to the user.

"Clean Code. Whew!" by Dave Hoover

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 06:31:11 -0500

Great to hear that this book is coming soon! I am excited to read it and share it with my team.

"What is SOA, really?" by puja.khatri(puja24k2007@rediffmail.com)

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:51:06 -0500

Excellent Presentation waiting for the next series the way of presentation is very good as it is presented by taking live examples.