Low Country Software Ramblings

If you’re like me, you’ll be thinking “What has he been smoking?!”

You can blame Timo for launching me down this path. He pointed to Atomic Object’s blog entries dealing with Embedded development.
The latest entry: a presentation at RubyConf 2007, on how they used Ruby with their embedded project, a PIC based system no less.

“Ruby you say!?!”

I did not say in their embedded platform.

They use it to drive their unit testing… Unit Testing?! In embedded?
Yes, Ruby driving unit testing for an embedded PIC project.

It almost makes me want to move to Western Michigan…almost.

Seriously, go take a look. This gives you a glimpse of what is possible with embedded systems. Let’s all leave the printf era behind… Go learn about unit testing, agile development, refactoring. Please.

No Comments »

Who says a small town can’t have gridlock?

.NET

There is an IDE for PowerShell called PowerShell Analyzer. It looks quite yummy! I feel a download coming. (via The Daily Grind)

Scott Hanselman provides an interesting perspective on the significance of Silverlight for web application development.
Community

Somewhat off topic, but Tom Peter’s blog points to The Guardian’s list of greatest speeches of the 20th Century. Well worth a listen!

Testing

Jonathan Kohl has a great post on how to get started with Exploratory Testing. Worth a read.

No Comments »

To aggregate or not to aggregate…that is the question on a day like this!
Community

Looks like Sam Gentile will give a session about the internals of the CLR at DevTeach. He also shows you what you need to build the Rotor V2 CLR.
Sam is feeling constrained about what he can put on the CodeBetter blog. To alleviate this, he has started a new blog about non-professional pursuits. I admire Sam immensely. His writing (unlike mine) is always impeccable and informative.

Design

Reaching back in the archives, I found this interesting post about including security in Use Case Modeling.

Testing

Another oldie at Michael’s (or is it Micahel’s) blog about what to put in the resolution field of your bug tracking software.  You are using bug tracking software aren’t you?

No Comments »

Testing is the word of the day…
Grab Bag

Simon Baker points to a discussion on multi-tasking as a way to avoid prioritization.

Scott Hanselman discusses email signature etiquette.  Lots of examples.

A .NET Rocks interview with Adam Cogan pointed to his exhaustive list of “Rules & Standards“.  While you might not agree with every single one, you wouldn’t go wrong following them.
Test Driven Design 

While I find that TestDriven.com’s scores low on my personal signal-to-noise ratio (too many commercial announcements), you should keep an eye out for their monthly recap.  I would suggest subscribing to the newsletter version if you don’t want to deal with all the RSS announcements.  From my perspective, the best part is the blogosphere activity. Of particular note this month:

• Alberto Savoia wonders why developer testing is not more prevalent.
• Srinivas Ramgopal posted his teams experience with an XP project.  This sparked a lively discussion. The site banner alone is worth a look.
• Jamis opines that with TDD, you should do UI first, not scaffolding.
• James Carr talks about backseat driving when pair programming.  While I’ve had my share of backseat drivers, it wasn’t while pair programming…

Testing
DDJ’s Michael Hunter has an interesting interview with Bj Rollison. The best quote: “Anecdotal evidence suggests that less than 5% of testers have read more than 1 book on software testing”.  That boggles my mind!  I’m on the design side of things, but even I have read a few books on the subject!  Both Michael’s & Bj’s blogs are worth a read… *sigh*

No Comments »