Via Martin Fowler, I learned that John Vlissides died after a long battle with cancer. John was one of the Gang of Four who wrote the definitive book on design patterns.
His page on c2 has been turned into a sort of memorial wiki page by the people who had met him. Aside from the book, he has had a significant impact on a number of people. I do wish I had gotten to meet him.
Over at the Creating Passionate Users blog (which has more useful information on it than any other blog I can think of), there’s an excellent post called If your software was on a date which lays some ground rules for your applications:
How would your software (or product, service, book, cause, etc.) behave on a date? Perhaps the best model for software developers is the singles scene, so let’s see how this time-tested dating advice for men might be applied to software:
The article goes on to give some excellent advice, including “Be polite, be helpful”, and “Be forgiving”.
It’s an excellent article overall, but I couldn’t help but think there was one thing missing: “Be easy to get to know”. Offer a free trial. Show me a flash or Quicktime demo of what you can do (screenshots are a copout - how many people started using Rails because of the 15 minute video? I did.), and offer a forum for sharing information with other users, and with the software’s developers. 37Signals gets this last point very well, their product blogs are very useful.
Ship It! By Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr.
Ship It! is a book about basics. It’s an education in the fundamental practices that are needed to develop software successfully. This is the stuff they don’t teach you in college. Ship It doesn’t espouse a particular methodology (such as Scrum or XP). Rather, it is a set of practices. The advantage of this is that you don’t have to adopt everything in an all-or-nothing fashin. In fact the authors state explicitly that you should use the things that work and don’t use the things that don’t work. This will work particularly well in situations where someone works in an environment that has an entrenched methodology. While management might not be willing to buy off on a wholesale switch to a different methodology, many of the practices outlined in this book don’t require you to spend any money. Therefore, individual developers, leads, or managers can implement a couple of practices (say “The List”, and daily meetings) without needing management approval.
Let me start off by saying that I’m a huge fan of the Pragmatic Programmers. The original book completely changed the way I approached programming. I’ve bought several books from them since then, and have been extremely happy with them all. This is rare. Even O’Reilly has a few stinkers amongst all of their great books. The point is, I started reading this book with high expectations.
The book is divided into four basic sections:
The first section, Tools and Infrastructure, covers the basics of software development tools. It not only covers what you need, but how you should use it. The tools covered here include source control (with an emphasis on Subversion), build scripts (using tools like Ant and NAnt), continuous integration, defect and feature tracking, and more. The book obviously can’t go into each tool in great depth, but there is enough there for you to get a good understanding of why you would want to use these tools.
The section on Pragmatic Project Techniques is equally interesting. As I said before, Jared and William don’t advocate any particular methodology, but have acquired a collection of practices over their years of software development that work. That said, there’s a fair amount of overlap with traditional agile methods. It covers techniques such as daily meetings (aka Daily Standups in XP), a shared list of work referred to as “The List”, among others. I would imagine that this section of the book would be the most useful to the majority of people reading this book. Geeks tend to focus on tools (section 1), but often ignore the processes that make a project successfull (or not).
Tracer Bullet Development was covered in the original Pragmatic Programmers book, though this book covers it in much greater depth. It’s very useful in situations where the client doesn’t fully know what he/she wants. You essentially build a prototype, and use it to draw out the requirements from your customer. It’s more involved than that (it warranted its own section in the book), you’ll need to read the book to gain a full understanding.
Common Problems and How to Solve Them was probably my favorite section of the book. It’s a collection of 18 recipes for how to handle a given situation using the principles outlined previously in the book. It covers situations like “The customers are unhappy” and “Features keep creeping in” with practical advice for how to deal with them. All of us find ourselves in these kind of situations from time to time, and this book would come in very handy when they do arise.
In summary, I think this is an excellent book. It’s not billed as such, but it could almost be considered a sequel to the original Pragmatic Programmers book. While the original focused on the tools and techniques of the trade, this book elaborates on those and adds a lot of information on processes. Combine this with the “Common Problems” section, and you have a very useful book indeed. The writing style is somewhat casual, similar to the other books from the Pragmatic Programmers, and the book is filled with real-world examples from the authors. I would highly recommend Ship It! to anyone interested in improving their software development skills.
A collection of tools that support PostgreSQL, courtesy of a commenter in this Slashdot post (both commercial and non represented here).
pgAdminIII Side note on this one - there’s a beta of the new version out, the UI is quite improved.
Creating a header background Good information for the design challenged (like me).
Tag database schemas A good look at a variety of database schemas for “taggable” information.
Creating a business logo Ian Landsman walks through the process of creating a logo for your business.
Creating printable documents with Ruby Discussion of PDF::Writer, both standalone, and with Rails.
One of the things that I love about Ruby is that it’s intuitive. If I don’t know the syntax for a particular thing, I can often just guess. More often than not, I’m right (or real close). That’s the mark of a great language. It behaves like you would expect it to behave.
Ruby==Love.
There’s an interview in the latest Make magazine with Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and many other cool things. It’s a good interview, and definitely worth your time to read it. One thing that stuck out was this quote on designing things: “I do very little research as to what the product should be … if you do “product research”, the product that you end up with will be similar to what already exists”.
I think this is why we see so many products that only get evolutionary upgrades, instead of revolutionary ones. People are stuck on what already exists, instead of being willing to throw it all out and start anew.
This reminds me of the ClearRX medicine bottle redesign. Pill bottles have looked basically the same for as long as I can remember. Now someone has come along and turned it on it’s ear. None of the changes required new technology to be invented, it just needed someone to think about the problem differently.
Ruby on Rails is much the same. Everything in there had been done before, but someone came along and said “let’s look at this problem differently.” And it’s turned the web development world on it’s ear. Even if Rails were gone tomorrow, it’s impact would live on for years to come.
What else is due for an overhaul?
Here’s my short list, off the top of my head:
What’s missing?
As I meander through the internet, I often find sites that inspire the wannabe designer in me. I’ve started collecting them, so that when it comes time to develop applications, I have a collection to go to for inspiration. In the event that I’m working with a designer, it gives me something to send them and say “I like stuff like this”.
Here are a few recent favorites:
Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Wil Shipley is the author of several well known Mac applications, notably OmniGraffle and Delicious Library , and has a well-read blog. In a post here he asserts that “Unit testing is teh suck”.
Although Wil is a bright guy and very likely a better programmer than I will ever be, this is completely out of touch with reality. I suspect anyone that has done TDD, or even used a unit testing tool would agree with me.
Wil starts off with this statement:
I've NEVER, EVER seen a structured test program that (a) didn't take like 100 man-hours of setup time, (b) didn't suck down a ton of engineering resources, and © actually found any particularly relevant bugs.
Well, I think Wil may be exaggerating a bit with the 100 hours nonsense, but let’s assume he’s not for just a second. I’ve never written a single line of ObjectiveC code, but if OCUnit is anything like the other unit testing tools out there (NUnit, JUnit, Test::Unit), this is a ridiculous statement. As for not finding relevant bugs, I find it unlikely as well.
Next up is this statement:
It's actually provably impossible to test your program with every conceivable type of input programmatically, but if you test by hand you can change the input in ways that you, the programmer, know might be prone to error.Sorry, wrong answer. Anything you can do manually can (and should) be automated. Two reasons:
Summary: Unless you have a good set of unit tests, real regression testing is nearly impossible.
Next, Wil describes his testing methodology:
When you modify your program, test it yourself. Your goal should be to break it, NOT to verify your code. That is, you should turn your huge intellect to "if I hated this code, how could I break it" as SOON as you get a working build, and you should document all the ways you break it. \[Sure, maybe you don't want to bother fixing the bug where if you enter 20,000 lines of text into the "item description" your program gets slow. But you should test it, document that there is a problem, and then move on.\] You KNOW that if you hated someone and it was your job to break their program, you could find some way to do it. Do it to every change you make.
There amount of time it would take to do this on a program of any size is ridiculous. Although Wil may have the self-discipline to do this, the rest of us likely don’t. And again, it’s not a repeatable process.
Here’s the bottom line: Unit tests are important. Extremely important. And they don’t add time to a project, in fact in most cases they will reduce it. At first blush this doesn’t make much sense, but here’s the rationale:
Wil has forgotten one of the basic rules of software development: Catch Bugs Early. If you catch a bug when you’re just getting started, it costs nearly nothing to fix. Find that same bug after you have released it to the world, and it costs significantly more - particularly if you’re not talking about a web application.
On top of all of this, there are a couple of other points worth making about Unit Tests:
Summary: Unit tests == Awesome, and represent all that is good in the world. I certainly don’t think that they’re a panacea, but they’re certainly not “teh suck”.
I didn’t expect this to turn into such a rant, but when people who are respected and admired in the community make harmful and incorrect statements, they need to be corrected.
Steve Krug’s classic book Don’t Make Me Think has been released in a second edition. This book helped me understand web design and usability better than any other.
Words and pictures by Larry Wright. A little bit of everything, mostly nerdy.