UNIT (uber nerd in training)

This is granddaughter Camryn browsing my tech library... she immediately goes for Stevens' UNIX Network Programming and TCP/IP Illustrated... a solid background in the classics is central to any tech education.

She starts Category Theory next week :-)

Design methodolgy

A compliment to HDD... DDD

Saturday digest

Some cool links for today:
Making mutable state in OCaml faster
Comparison of some Ruby Mock libraries
More IRB customization
Google I/O sessions & slides
Provable software
Graph Theory (pdf)
Google Wave blog
Blackbox testing for Rack-based apps (including Rails)

Tachyon debugger

Saw this old post about odb this morning, makes me think Ruby should have something like it.

I'd call it the Tachyon debugger, which of course brain links to one of the best bad movies of all time.

The neurons are firing on all synapses this morning! :-)

Nice IRB add-on

This is nice for those of us who refuse to leave the command line.

One editor to rule them all...

Another decent intro to using gvim as your ide. This if for python but would work equally well for ruby.

Toss this in for debugging and you're off to the races.

I love vi, vi loves me :-)

Morning Math

I love the smell of Math in the morning ... it smells like VICTORY.

Sadness

A moment of silence and all flags at half staff please...

Drunkard's Walk

I put The Drunkard's Walk into my library queue this morning, it got me to thinking about my issues with the current fads (TDD, BDD, Agile, pair, ...) in software development. I'm wondering if our numerous false conceptions about the way things work aren't at the root cause of the problem.

Brains are certainly tricky devices :-)

Testing

We're using RSpec & TDD on this engagement.

TDD is no great shakes, the cart before the horse imo but to each their own.

I am increasingly worried about what specs 'prove' (in the loosest sense) about the correctness of code. And even more about what they say about code as it changes.

I've looked at generating tests (and correctness 'proof') from the AST via RubyParser but even a simple class here has at least several mixins and before/after filters. Given Bob Martin's RailsConf snark about Smalltalk's "death" ("it's too easy to make a mess" (via Ward Cunningham)) that's definitely the pot calling the kettle black.

We'll see where this goes.

Back

Wow, looking at that last post it's been awhile, lots of water under the bridge.

Spent most of last year working on SolarPowerMe (ActionScript, Ruby, Rails, WebOrb). We then took those ideas and simplified them and moved them to Facebook (all Ruby, Rails, and Facebooker)

That didn't pan out so now I'm on a Ruby/Rails contract gig in KC.

Ruby & Rails is fine but really nothing new (for an old Smalltalk guy :-)... I'm working on some ideas that interest me in OCaml... more about those here later.

Pair programming

I've come to the end of my patience with pair programming.

I can't say whether or not pairing is a good idea in general, for me personally it's a bad idea.

I could be glib and say watching someone else program is about as satisfying as watching someone else have sex... but there's more to it than that.

The communication pairing requires is antagonistic to the deep thinking that programming generally requires (for me). I suppose it's another symptom of the 'multi-tasking' attitude that gives most things (driving, conversation, programming, thinking) such short shrift.

Anyway, on to the next silver bullet! :-)