I’ve just finished reading Tom DeMarco‘s Slack, a book aimed at dissolving the myth that total efficiency within an organisation is “a good thing”.
This book is more general than Peopleware, DeMarco’s software development oriented book (which I found to be a more engaging read, probably because I’m a developer).
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Thanks to Kevin Worthington for his installation instructions. Comments are closed on his post so I’ve added these notes to my own blog.
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I’d like to apologise on VPS.net’s behalf, my blog has been slow and unresponsive for the last couple of months. Despite a SAN upgrade and my VM being moved to a different hypervisor, and my VM’s disk performance being ‘tuned’ by tech support … eventually it falls back to a snails pace. VPS.net have been plagued by their SAN choice for a while. I’ll switch to Linode over Christmas.
Merry Christmas to all!
This isn’t my affidavit of being a copy and paste programmer. vim has recently become my code editor of choice, having used Eclipse for years, and Netbeans for most of this year. Poor network performance at work means both of those IDEs slow me down.
One annoyance with vim is pasting text from another application. Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve watched the world eulogise Steve Jobs over the last 48 hours. To me, there’s no better testament to his brilliance than quantity of profound quotes. I found one particularly poignant on focus and simplicity:
Simple can be harder than complex: you have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple
This quote stood out to me because it epitomises what I aim to achieve in my code, I can’t say I’m always successful.
Farewell Mr Jobs, consumer electronics will be a little less brilliant without you.
When writing unit tests, it’s often useful to know the code coverage you’ve achieved to see what proportion of your code you’re exercising. Typically you have to commit your code to version control, so your CI server can pull in your updates and produce coverage reports. This means you sometimes commit incomplete tests, where you might forget to test failure branches (throwing exceptions for example).
