blog = reinterpret_cast<>(life);
One of the most laborious things about starting work at a new client / employer, can be getting your machine and user account configured so that you are able to work on their codebase. For me, the acid test of whether I’m in a good place is being able to build the code and run the necessary test suites locally that I’ll be relying on for the early feedback loop. But that’s the bare minimum. There…
[ Despite being almost 30 years ago, and the finer details being lost in the mists of time, the punchline has always stayed with me – it’s scar tissue I guess :o). ] I was contracting in a team which had taken over a codebase from another company, to try and improve the performance, as it was far below what was needed for even the smaller use cases they had in mind. The front-end was a…
This is quite a long post (15 mins) and if you’re only interested in my final musings, and not the day itself, just skip to the last two sections. Last Saturday I got to attend an event at Codurance’s offices in London around the use of AI based tooling to aid software delivery. I did not have much experience with these kinds of tools, in part because my current client uses their own in-house…
Note: This blog post follows the modern recipe style – a load of unimportant background history before presenting the real content. So, just hit page-down a few times if that’s what you came here for, I won’t be offended. Just over 10 years ago, fellow ACCU member Jez Higgins replied to another one of my programming one-liners on Twitter with a flippant remark that I probably had enough material…
I’ve no idea where I first came across the following premise for when starting a new code change: “First ask yourself, how do I test this?” I had assumed it was Steve Maguire’s Writing Solid Code or Debugging the Development Process as these are two of the earliest books I read as a professional developer. He has some excellent advice in “step through your code in the debugger” and “how could I…
An interesting question came up at a meet-up I recently attended, where they were discussing approaches to coaching and mentoring. The question was not overly interesting by itself, but the roller-coaster of a journey as we got to the essence of the real problem, was. The initial framing of the question by one of the attendees was this: “How do I tell someone to optimise their code?” The wording…
Ever since the rise of LLM based tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot there have been quips made about how great it makes as a pairing partner. The joke is because these tools are passive and won’t trash your code, or disagree with your approach, or smell of garlic. I get the joke. The problem for me is that these jokes are suggesting that using tools like CoPilot are akin to pairing, but they’re not.…
Last time I wrote about the monthly Cambridge Software Crafters Meetup which I started attending almost a year ago. In that post I briefly mentioned the Architecture Kata session which I found particularly interesting as I’ve never done anything like that before. I’ve been aware of katas for a long time, but they’ve tended to focus on solving simple problems in code, usually with a test-first…
Despite living pretty close to Cambridge I’ve never actually worked there. For the past 25 years I’ve commuted to London because it was easier and faster than getting to Cambridge [1]. The daily rates for contract programmers in the finance industry might also have had an influence too :o). Anyway, one consequence of working in London meant that I had access to all the London meetups in the…
Most of the time these days when I get into a conversation about naming it tends to be about tweaking the language, perhaps because I think there is a much better term available, or the author is a non-native speaker and they’ve transliterated the name and it’s ended being quite jarring, or worse, ambiguous. I’m also on somewhat of a personal crusade to try and vastly reduce the lazy use of “get”…
Just over 14 years ago I posted the eulogy I wrote for my father on this blog ( So Long and Thanks For All the Onions ) mostly because I had just started writing and this blog gave me the confidence to write. Sadly, a month ago my mother passed away too and yesterday I got to present my eulogy for her as well. The writing practice from the intervening 14 years undoubtedly made the mechanics easier…
This post was prompted by a document I read which was presented as a development guide. While the rest of it was about style, the section that particularly piqued my interest was one involving code ownership. For those of us who’ve been around the block, the term “code ownership” can bring with it connotations of protectionism. If you’ve never worked with people who are incredibly guarded about…
As one of the few devs that both likes and is reasonably well-versed in PowerShell I became the point of contact for a colleague that was bemused by a performance oddity when querying the number of cores on a host. He was introducing Ninja into the build and needed to throttle its expectations around how many actual cores there were because hyperthreading was enabled and our compilation intensive…
An interesting bug cropped up the other day in a dub configuration file which made me realise I wasn’t consciously aware of the precedence of && when used in an IF statement with cmd.exe . Batch File Idioms I’ve written a ton of batch files over the years and, with error handling being a manual affair, the usual pattern is to alternate pairs of statement + error check, e.g. mkdir folder if…
[I’m sure there is something else going on here but on the off-chance someone else is also observing this and also lost at least they’ll know they’re not alone.] We have a GitLab project pipeline that started out as a monolithic job but over the last 9 months has slowly been parallelized and now runs as over 150 jobs spread out across a cluster of 4 fairly decent [1] machines with 8 to 10…
We were writing a new service to distribute financial pricing data around the trading floor as a companion to our new desktop pricing tool. The plugin architecture allowed us to write modular components that could tap into the event streams for various reasons, e.g. provide gateways to 3rd party data streams. Linking New to Old One of the first plugins we wrote allowed us to publish pricing data…
I had taken a new contract at an investment bank and started working on a very mature codebase which was stored in ClearCase. As a long-time user [1] of version control systems one of the things that bugged me about the codebase were empty commit messages. On a mature codebase where people have come and gone it’s hard enough to work out what was going on just from the code, decent commit messages…
Like most programmers I’ve generally tried to steer well clear of getting involved in management duties. The trouble is that as you get older I think this becomes harder and harder to avoid. Once you get the mechanics of programming under control you might find you have more time to ponder about some of those other duties which go into delivering software because they begin to frustrate you. The…
Let’s be honest, hiring people is hard and there are no perfect approaches. However it feels somewhat logical that if you’re hiring someone who will spend a significant amount of their time solving problems by writing software, then you should probably at least try and validate that they are up to the task. That doesn’t mean you don’t also look for ways to asses their suitability for the other…
Way back at the beginning of my professional programming career I worked for a small software house that wrote graphics software. Although it had a desktop publisher and line-art based graphics package in its suite it didn’t have a bitmap editor and so they decided to outsource that to another local company. A Different User Base The company they chose to outsource to had a very high-end bitmap…
My current role is more of a DevOps role and I’m spending more time than usual monitoring and administrating various services, such as the GitLab instance we use for source control, build pipelines, issue management, etc. While the GitLab UI is very useful for certain kinds of tasks the rich RESTful API allows you to easily build your own custom tools to to monitor, analyse, and investigate the…
I was working on a new system – a grid based calculation engine for an investment bank – and I was beginning to read about some crazy ideas by Netflix around how they would kill off actual production servers to test their resilience to failure. I really liked this idea as it had that “put your money where your mouth is” feel to it and I felt we were designing a system that should cope with this…
I signed off My 200th Blog Post in November 2014 with the following words: See you again in a few years. At the time I didn’t think it would take me over 5 years to write another 100 blog posts, but it has. Does this mean I’ve stopped writing and gone back to coding, reading, and gaming more on my daily commute? No, the clue is also in that blog post: My main aspiration was that writing this blog…
A few years back I got to spend a couple of weeks consulting at a small company involved in the production of smart cards. My team had been brought in by the company’s management to cast our critical eye over their software development process and provide a report on what we found along with any recommendations on how it could be improved. The company only had a few developers and while the…
My recent tirade against unnecessary branching – “ Git is Not the Problem ” – might have given the impression that I don’t appreciate the power that git provides. That’s not true and hopefully the following example highlights the appreciation I have for the power git provides but also why I dislike being put in that position in the first place. The Branching Strategy I was working in a small team…