The code generation crowd are at it again. So, "writing code" is stupid is it? Well what will we call writing the requirements in a form that the code generators can understand and why will it be easier to get the requirements right?…

It's easy to write untestable code. It's natural. Most code that we write will be hard to test unless we explicitly think about testing when we write it...…

If I don't write enough blog entries then the way I have my CSS set up means that the front page starts to look ugly as the number of entries on the left side of the page shrinks and the columns on the right go all squigly... Is that why blog people end up writing these inane items that nobody really wants to read?…

We tried the new Carluccios on Upper Street on Friday night. Great food and excellent service. Back to watch the final Buffy (season 6) on DVD (so sad); glass or two of Glenfiddich, bug hunting and to bed. Up early to bug hunt and then skating in Kensington Gardens on Saturday morning. Back to get changed and then off to The Blue Elephant in Fulham for Hilary's birthday do; more great food, left my unbrella at the restaurant :(. More bug hunting on Sunday morning followed by some skating down at the local authority car park in the afternoon -…

Given that the work I do goes on in my head and can be done anywhere I find that it's often done everywhere. Anyone got any hints on how to switch off?…

Three bugs went into a program; a memory leak, a misunderstood interface and a deadlock...…

Finally finished reading Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects and it was well worth the read.…

A couple of days ago I posted some untestable code. I've had a couple of emails saying that people couldn't see why the code was untestable. Here's why, and here's how to fix it.…

Brian Foote and Joseph Yoder writing about software architecture (or the lack of it). Thanks to Bryan Boreham for the link.…

So there are 10 guys on a stag weekend in Amsterdam. Much drinking. Lots of foolish games with very fluid rules and fines for people who did not comply. Many fines were collected. At some point during the drinking games on the first evening, number 28 became significant. It was decided that the money from the fines would go on 28 when we visited the casino the following night... Fast forward to the bar just before the casino and the collection of fines had reached around 135 euros and we started to lose our bottle. A change of plan, 10…

We've been moving pretty quickly on the refactoring project. We had got to the point where we were doing at least two releases a week. Generally we would include user requested fixes in the first release and refactored code in the second. It started to become a little hectic. Last week we decided to slow things down a little so that we could regroup...…

The online game approaches completion but recently the requirements were lacking and we couldn't see the way forward. We're finishing the game play and getting to the complicated special cases - I'm hoping that they won't be complicated or special once I understand them more... The original story that explained the latest piece of work was lacking when we analysed it closely; we fleshed it out and now I think we understand it enough to quote for it and code it. We'll see. At least we're still moving forward, albeit slower than we'd have hoped.…

The free source code integration project has its first code drop and then its second code drop... Almost complete. The integration has gone pretty well. The server code now has a neat little facade that allows it to impersonate the MFC server code that the client wants to replace.…

A while back Carson asked me how I managed to keep track of all the projects that I was working on; I said that I had practiced being productive over short time periods, tried to stay focused on one thing at a time and not to switch projects too quickly. There's more to it than that though as I found out recently...…

Agile Software Development - Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert C. Martin This book is physically heavier than most of the books I've been reading lately but I'm still carrying it to work even though I only get around 5 mins reading done on the tube during the journey. It's a beautiful book; the typeface and illustractions are stunning, the paper feels rich, the cover is cool and colourful. The content is pretty good too. Robert Martin knows his stuff and this book seems to pull all of the things that I'm currently interested in together in one place. I'm…

I've spent the morning doing test driven development, properly; writing tests first and everything. It works, it's faster and it's addictive.…

I want someone to quote for converting my company web site, www.jetbyte.com, to use Movable Type as its content management system. Anyone interested in the work?…

So, I read my own blog and follow the links I put in the entries, does that make me a bad person? After writing the post on Bob Martin's book I went off to read his blog, good stuff, read it!…

When we were in Amsterdam doing the stag thing I saw a Jethro Tull video on the local music station. I wasn't actually aware that such a thing existed; but it sure brought back memories.…

Hit a deadline early this afternoon and hadn't chased up some requirements so I ran out of things to implement. Faced with a couple of hours spare I whipped out Gimpel Lint and started to polish...…

As I mentioned a while back, the refactoring project's FX functionality was developed by guess work. We're fixing that now by spending some time gaining an understanding of the problem domain as we refactor.…

Writing stuff down makes you think about things. Take the "balls in the air" piece. I had a problem, I didn't realise what the problem was until I wrote about it and now, a week later I see the problem coming up again and know what it is and how to avoid it. Magic!…