Jeff Atwood thinks monkeypatching should frighten you:But if wielding that power doesn’t scare and humble you a little, too, then maybe you should leave the monkeypatching to the really smart monkeys.
Reg Braithwaite thinks it should exhilarate you:And ultimately, that is what this line of code says to me about Ruby. It says that this […]
One of my biggest pet peeves in doing QA is when I spend half a day trying to track down why a bug I thought I’d fixed has cropped up again, only to discover that the reporter was looking at an old version of the application. Good revision tracking is vital to doing efficient […]
[I’m reposting this from my personal journal as it has development applicability – in so much as it is a tale about how NOT to design software.]
So I’ve been trying to wire money to Kenya. No, I haven’t been contacted by the wife of a former dictator who needs my urgent assistance in moving […]
Working as I do in the Rails world these days, I’m periodically reminded of the difference between me and most Rails programmers. That is, the fact that I came to Rails via Ruby, rather than vice-versa. Usually this happens when someone at work or in the blog world expresses delight (or perplexity) about […]
A passage in Charles Nutter’s reaction to MagLev caught my eye today:
First off, they demonstrated its distributed object database automatically synchronizing globally-reachable state across multiple VMs. It’s an amazing new idea that the world has never really seen…
except that it isn’t. This is based on existing OODB technology that Gemstone and others have been promoting […]
2008-5-23 Avdi – Lotus desk
Originally uploaded by taboulichic
I’ve been increasingly dissatisfied with office chairs both at the office and at home lately. I just can’t seem to find a configuration that gives me the back support I need for hours-long coding sessions. I’ve considered joining the standing-desk crowd but I’m not sure that […]
Inspired by this talk by Jim Weirich:
Image by scottfeldstein, some rights reserved.
(For the shaving nerds, this poster features the Merkur Hefty Classic, a razor I recently acquired and am so far pretty happy with.)
I was thinking about the topic of beautiful code this morning. There’s a lot of disagreement about what constitutes beauty in code. I’ve watched Marcel Molina Jr. talk about Plato and Pythagoras. O’Reilly has published a whole book on the subject. On the other hand, Jeff Atwood thinks that there’s no such thing.. […]
In our last episode we were augmenting FMTP::Message classes to deal with messages split across multiple packets. As is often the case, fixing one problem revlealed another. What with the unstable weather patterns in Oz – you never know when a spacetime-ripping tornado will appear out of nowhere – our flying monkeys sometimes get […]