The reason so many New Year Resolutions get dropped, is because people start doing something out of the ordinary (for them) in order to institute a change, but never make that change a habit. It’s the reason dieting does not work – you shouldn’t go on a diet, you should change your diet. The former [...]
Categories: Development
Tagged: antipatterns
So all the cool Clojure kids keep wanting me to use Emacs. The problem is that I haven’t used Emacs for the last 10 years – since, in fact, I had to support a C application on about 7 different flavours of UNIX. As you can imagine, I’ve since expunged many of those past memories. [...]
Categories: clojure
The Checkin Gate defines a set of tests which need to pass before a developer checks in. Typically, the tests are a subset of the total test suite – selected to provide a good level of coverage, whilst running in a short space of time. There is an inherent trade-off with a Checkin Gate though [...]
Categories: Build And Deployment Patterns
I’m currently working on a personal project by way of learning Clojure – it’s actually a program to match up my itemised phone bill against my list of contacts to help me expense my calls. I find it best to have a real-world problem I need to solve to learn a new programming language. The [...]
Categories: clojure
Recently, both Paul Julius and Chris Read pointed out that I was perhaps the first person to document the concept of build pipelines, at least in terms of how it relates to continuous integration and the like. As it turns out, the original posts on the subject are from further back than I remember: An [...]
Categories: Build And Deployment
When using a Continuous Integration build, before long you’ll break it. Breaking a build is not a bad thing, however it is typically the team’s top priority to have such a build fixed. Beyond the shame associated with having been named as the breaker, you then have the hassle of lots of people informing you [...]
Categories: Build And Deployment Patterns
When running a suite of tests – either as part of a Continuous Integration build, or part of a check-in gate – speed is the enemy. You are always trying to find the balance between test coverage and time to complete the entire suite. Both a check-in gate and continuous integration build have slightly different [...]
Categories: Build And Deployment Patterns
It’s common practise within a team to define a set of tasks which should be run by each developer prior to checking in. The purpose of the Check-in Gate is to attempt to ensure that all code satisfies some basic level of quality. Like all development standards, a check-in gate helps a team stay on [...]
Categories: Build And Deployment Patterns
This guide assumes you’ve already installed Eclipse, PyDev, Python and Django. It also assumes you’re using Eclipse 3.2, PyDev 1.2.4, Django 0.95 and Python 2.4. * Go to Window->Preferences->Preferences->PyDev->Python Interpretter and add the django source file to the PYTHONPATH settings. * Create a new PyDev pyhon project. Make sure you uncheck the ‘create src folder’ [...]
Categories: Django
I’ll be presenting a session entitled “Refactoring Databases for fun and profit” with a colleague at this year’s “XP Day 2006″:http://www.xpday.org/. XP Day (not just XP, not just one day…) is run by the long-established (and Olde Bank of England regulars) the “Extreme Tuesday Club”:http://www.xpdeveloper.com/. I attended last year and can highly recommend it to [...]
Categories: Agile