Write an awesome description for your new site here. You can edit this line in _config.yml. It will appear in your document head meta (for Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description.
@watch(1)@, part of "procps":procps, is one of my favorite command line utilities. It repeatedly executes a command so you can watch the output change, and if you pass the optional @--diff/-d@ command line argument it highlights the changes between executions (or across every execution with @--difference=cumulative@). It's great for one-off monitoring uses, like running @/sbin/ifconfig@ to see how…
"Code Simplicity":book was a terrible disappointment. I was excited by the novel prospect that the author managed to create an original science of software design, but in reality this book is just a vague, rambling argument in favor of "Agile software development":agile. In fact, every idea in this book has already been presented in far better books by "Kent Beck":beck, "Martin Fowler":fowler,…
I thought "Test-Driven Infrastructure with Chef":book was fantastic! It offers a great, no-nonsense introduction to "Chef":chef and the concept "Infrastructure as Code."
I've added a new category to my site, "Books":http://kent.spillner.org/blog/books/, where I intend to post book reviews. This new category comes complete with "its very own feed":http://feeds.feedburner.com/kent-spillner-books.
Consistent environments are important on software projects. They increase the team's productivity, make it easier to diagnose, replicate and resolve bugs, make it easier to tune performance and scale the application, and reduce the cost of administration and maintenance. Building consistent environments is a great candidate for automation; in fact, tools like "Chef":chef and "Puppet":puppet were…
_*TRANSLATIONS:* "Spanish":spanish (gracias, José!)_
Today is my last day working for "ThoughtWorks":http://www.thoughtworks.com. After four and a half years, I decided to hang up my consultant's cape and try something new: I accepted an offer from "DRW Trading Group":http://www.drw.com starting next week.
Private methods are a code smell. They should be moved to collaborating classes and made public.
I gave my _Tao of Test-Driven Development_ tutorial at OOPSLA 2009 in Orlando, FL. The tutorial began with a quick lecture-style introduction to test-driven development, and concluded with a hands-on coding dojo for attendees to practice what they learned.
My current project integrates with a lot of external services. Unfortunately, our service-level agreements do not extend to our development and testing environments, so our application breaks frequently because of service problems. Services go down, services have bugs in the latest development versions deployed in our environments, our environments are upgraded to new versions of services that are…