Comments for Ministry of Coding Blog

Comment on Automated Test Distinctions: The Food Pyramid by Continuous Deployment for Existing Software – Do it Now « Ministry of Coding Blog

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:27:44 +0000

[...] was using at Victors United. I added some very basic test automation, starting from the top of the test automation food pyramid with a simple “is the web server able to execute code, connect to the database server, and [...]

Comment on Always Be Shipping – Real-World Continuous Deployment by Continuous Deployment for Existing Software – Do it Now « Ministry of Coding Blog

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 23:27:42 +0000

[...] recently wrote about doing continuous deployment from day one with a software project that had pretty good test automation and (if I do say so myself) a somewhat [...]

Comment on Automated Test Distinctions: The Food Pyramid by Always Be Shipping – Real-World Continuous Deployment « Ministry of Coding Blog

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 02:10:45 +0000

[...] I’ve written about these sorts of automated test distinction a couple of years ago, in a post about the Automated Testing Food Pyramid. [...]

Comment on Who needs monospaced/fixed width fonts? by Martin Cron

Martin Cron — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 22:32:57 +0000

Wow, Steve, nothing like someone talking about Xerox PARC and Smalltalk to make you feel like a total newbie.

Comment on Who needs monospaced/fixed width fonts? by Steve Freeman

Steve Freeman — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 21:29:48 +0000

Years ago I used the Cedar system at Xerox PARC, which had variable-width fonts for coding. Is was very readable, but then the whole approach was built with that in mind, including useful tabbing. I had to change my attitude a bit, but the whole experience was much pleasanter. Later I got to try it in the Smalltalk browser, which worked well with the compact syntax and small methods.

Great days (nostalgic sigh)

Comment on Who needs monospaced/fixed width fonts? by LizKing

LizKing — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 21:57:18 +0000

If you have a lot of conditional loops, it is easier to line up the parentheses in fixed font code. BTW, I found some great free fixed fonts specially for programmers called Proggy Fonts. Check out http://www.proggyfonts.com

Comment on Who needs monospaced/fixed width fonts? by b

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 15:58:45 +0000

Dude, fixed with fonts make code more readable, period. That’s not to say you have to structure your code like it’s fortran. But, having things line up is at times advantageous. If you don’t use a fixed withed font, you’re saying, “I never will align any of my code sections”. Never is a bad word.

Comment on Alternative to AlternatingItemTemplate Redundancy in ASP.NET by seishin

seishin — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:57:22 +0000

Hi!
thanks for the idea!! however comparing and assigning strings may be resource consuming so here’s my version:

private bool rowAlt = true;
private readonly string rowColor_1 = “#FFFFFF”;
private readonly string rowColor_2 = “#000000″;

public string GetCurrentRowColor()
{
rowAlt = !rowAlt;

if(rowAlt) return rowColor_1;
else return rowColor_2;

}

Comment on Who needs monospaced/fixed width fonts? by Tony

Tony — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 18:33:36 +0000

I used to do more coding than I do now, so it may be that my thoughts are obsolete at this point, but here goes:

There are at least 2 main ways the monospace helps me: it lines up features that I otherwise have to manually, and with great effort, count out, such as blank spaces, when I need a specific # of spaces rather than a length of space.

Second, even in your example above, in the second

push(x);
pull(x);

I had to look twice to be sure you had 2 of the letter l, rather than one, or three, or an l and an i, or what.

Aside from that, I work with tables a LOT (mathematician by trade) and these really have to be monospace to work right. Coding to create them in monospace makes much more sense.

Comment on Another 25 employees? No thank you. by LC

LC — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 01:22:40 +0000

How do you measure a 25% increase in productivity in the software development context, anyway?

Employing 100 (or 125 or more) isn’t automatically a recipe for disaster. These departments will inevitably coalesce into smaller teams which could, if managed correctly, do okay. They just need to be made into properly encapsulated project teams (technologically, not just managerially)–that’s really hard to do and limiting yourself to a smaller department will help to keep you from shooting yourself in the foot this way.

Developers shouldn’t be hoarded like cats, because the results are frighteningly similar.