April 2010
1 post
What made me start doing TDD
In 2001 I was writing robocode robots and battling them with some co-workers. Things were going well enough — win some, lose some — when a friend suggested we try writing unit tests for our bots. Great idea! I’d been wanting to learn unit testing since at least ‘97 when I read about it on the C2 wiki. Before I started writing the tests I thought they would help me catch those last...
Apr 5th
May 2009
1 post
… so the “heart” approach is a way of sidestepping the psychological immune system that normally operates to conserve our current view point, our current stored wisdom. I’m deriving this view point primarily from: http://www.amazon.com/Influence-Psychology-Persuasion-Robert-Cialdini/dp/0688128165 and ...
May 30th
April 2009
1 post
Thoughts on MacHeist
I pay for software, but I won’t pay for software if I’m not sure I’ll use it. MacHeist has allowed me to purchase software that I was curious about, but that I wouldn’t normally buy, because I wouldn’t use them enough to justify the cost. Previous examples are Pixelmator and VectorDesigner; current examples are Acorn and Espresso. I don’t know how much the...
Apr 7th
February 2009
4 posts
product owner feel threatened by IxD?
I can imagine an engineering team turning to Interaction Design as part of their work turning Product Owner stories/use cases into product. (Ok, I don’t need to imagine this, but I’m going to assume I’m not unique here…) I can imagine that as you get into the conversations that are part of IxD the Product Owners might feel threatened, because suddenly engineering is asking...
Feb 8th
feeling stupid
Jtf:safariwatir jfredrick$ ruby safariwatir_script.rb  /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `gem_original_require’: no such file to load — ./safariwatir/../watir/exceptions (LoadError) from /opt/local/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:32:in `require’ from ./safariwatir/scripter.rb:2 from...
Feb 7th
Watir lists.html
An Unordered List: Coffee Tea Milk An Ordered List: Phil Bob Joe
Feb 7th
I hate error messages while installing
Jtf:ostatli jfredrick$ sudo gem install firewatir Successfully installed xml-simple-1.0.11 Successfully installed rubyforge-1.0.2 Successfully installed hoe-1.8.3 Successfully installed s4t-utils-1.0.4 Successfully installed builder-2.1.2 Successfully installed user-choices-1.1.6 Successfully installed commonwatir-1.6.2 Successfully installed firewatir-1.6.2 8 gems installed Installing...
Feb 5th
January 2009
2 posts
"monad tutorial fallacy" and reading great code
For over a month now I’ve been planning a blog asking for examples of great code, code that is worthy of study. The idea being that programmers could learn from the masters they way practitioners in other disciplines do. But reading about the “monad tutorial fallacy” makes me wonder if this is viable. Just as you can’t understand how monads are burritos without having...
Jan 25th
I expect that in a project the estimates at first will be inconsistent as the team jells and gets their arms around the problem space and their solution. But over time their estimates will begin to have a kind of consistency to them that make velocity a meaningful tool for estimating throughput & backlog. If there are context changes within a project I believe you’d go through a...
Jan 24th
July 2008
3 posts
muddle
I had offered Newtonian mechanics and flat earth theory as various levels of wrong. Flat earth theory was a late substitution for creationism but it turned out to be a poor one. I had intended to contrast Newtonian mechanics as wrong but a useful approximation, while I was thinking of flat earth as ridiculously wrong and not even useful… except that it is. I use the approximation of a flat...
Jul 17th
AlphaLabelIncrementer
package com.jeffreyfredrick.cc; import org.apache.log4j.Logger; import org.jdom.Element; import net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.LabelIncrementer; public class AlphaLabelIncrementer implements LabelIncrementer {     private static final Logger LOG = Logger.getLogger(AlphaLabelIncrementer.class);     public String getDefaultLabel() {         return “a”;     }     public...
Jul 10th
AlphaLabelIncrementerTest
package com.jeffreyfredrick.cc; import net.sourceforge.cruisecontrol.LabelIncrementer; import junit.framework.TestCase; public class AlphaLabelIncrementerTest extends TestCase {     public void testLabelIncrementer() {         LabelIncrementer incrementer = new AlphaLabelIncrementer();         assertEquals(“a”, incrementer.getDefaultLabel());        ...
Jul 10th
June 2008
2 posts
Conversation is the key win
Brian pointed out that shorter articles require more sympathetic reading and more need for conversation. To me that is a big win of the short articles, the conversation, and it is a win for both sides. The author doesn’t need to spend time guessing about which misunderstanding I’m going to have and is then freed to reply to my actual misunderstanding. (Who will be the first to make...
Jun 23rd
Conference by affinity vs by problem
I was thinking of what you said: “as we use Open Space there is no problem to solve”. Now thinking I misunderstood you… but my initial thought was that perhaps you weren’t getting what you hoped out of the Open Space conferences because you weren’t choosing them based on a problem you had to solve, but rather based on “gathering of like-minded people”....
Jun 2nd