malvasia bianca

I just did my first work on dbcdb in about a month; if I was too sick to program for work, I was too sick to program on my pet projects. What I did was convert dbcdb to generate XHTML instead of plain old HTML. Which was trivial; the hard part was validating it. I […]

Author pages now contain links to their books and series, and I can now handle books with two authors. (Not three, not four, just two. Or one, of course.) I wrote my first generic Java method; whee. There was one mystery there: Book is a subtype of Entity, and at one point, I passed a […]

My reading list continues to give me high-priority requirements: the gorgeous Kabuki: Dreams makes me deal with series whose titles aren’t simply Title of Series, Volume XXX. It was easy enough that I got it out of the way right now, instead of waiting until the weekend.

I was planning to make dbcdb look beautiful (well, something other than butt-ugly) this weekend, but reality intervened in the form of books that I’ve read that didn’t fit into my existing setup. And keeping it up-to-date with respect to my current reading list is my current highest priority, so I spent a couple of […]

The Ruby on Rails demo is pretty amazing.

My sample page now looks significantly different. The ‘Author’ field links to another web page (a very sparse one currently; more will be added eventually). And there are ‘Last Read’, ‘Rating’, ‘ISBN’, and ‘Own’ fields (all optional). The ISBN field links to an appropriate Amazon page. A quite pleasant afternoon of programming, all things said. […]

This page looks the same as it did last week, but it’s being generated using Java. Whee. (And I hope it will look a little different by the end of the weekend.) I didn’t spend too much time programming: my time was mostly spent managing and understanding infrastructure. There’s now an acceptance test which runs […]

I’ve subscribed to my first podcasts: Agile Toolkit and The Sound of Vision. It really is nice that I can enter the URL for an RSS feed into iTunes and it will go and fetch new shows for me. And the iPod is definitely the right place for this sort of thing: if the podcasts […]

I’ve implemented my first story; the results can be seen at The Arcades Project. (Of course, if things go as planned, then the appearance of that page will drastically change over coming months!) I was pretty good about writing an acceptance test first. Which meant that I got to install Apache locally on my laptop, […]

I wish that I knew more about certain aspects of modern computer technology, espcially information-management aspects of technology. Examples of things that I wish I knew more about: Java. Ant. Eclipse, especially its automated refactoring tools. How to write a web page that doesn’t look like it was written a decade ago. Web pages that […]

I was unhappy with the result of our pair programming meeting for various reasons: we were all unhappy with how things were going, I was pretty sure that we were doing something wrong, but I didn’t know what it was. We’d adopted short-term measures to ease some of the pains, but I didn’t see them […]

About three months ago, my team started seriously experimenting with pair programming. It’s been more than long enough since then for us to take stock, so we had a meeting three or so weeks ago to talk about our experiences. The results were mixed, and really hard for me to get a grip on. Some […]

Ever since I read Refactoring to Patterns, I’ve been thinking that I should use Compose Method more. (I should really reread Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns to see what other low-level patterns I’ve missed.) But I’m too timid to perform quite that drastic surgery to the thicket of code that I’m working on. I just finished […]

Prompted by Knuth’s delightful article “The Errors of TeX”, I just read his collection Literate Programming. (Which contains the aforementioned article, among others.) A fascinating read, for multiple reasons: Knuth is a really smart guy, whose opinions I very much respect, but he’s writing from a context that I frequently find very hard to understand. […]

As I mentioned recently, my group has been experimenting with some XP-inspired agile planning. Now that that’s stabilized, the question is: where next? It’s still my plan for the group to end up at full XP, if possible. (Asuming our experiments with it continue to turn out well, of course.) It’s also still my plan […]

At work, I’ve recently been reading through a collection of papers on software development. Pretty boring, largely, until I got to the last article: “The Errors of TeX”, by Donald Knuth. Which was great! It turns out that Knuth kept a log of every single change he made to TeX from the beginning of debugging […]

I’m in the mood to blog about managing, so I thought I should add a “Managing” category. But how to fit it into the hierarchy? I manage programmers, and I expect most or all of my managing posts to be about programming as well. But programming is already the only subcategory I have; to add […]

At the Sun Engineering Conference a couple of months ago, I went to a workshop by Ron Jeffries on agile planning. That inspired me to try out the (XP) technique that he was proposing: the idea is to plan all work in terms of “stories” that you estimate will take between 1 and 3 “points” […]

(This is a lightly edited version of a post on an internal Sun mailing list on extreme programming). I just finished reading the Quality Software Management series, by Gerald Weinberg (which I learned about from the XP bibliography), and I heartily recommend it to anybody interested in XP, or for that matter other agile practices. […]

When we last left our refactoring saga, I was regretting having done a State extraction too early, and was about to throw it out, doing some more class extractions first. Which is what I did, and it was clearly the right decision; I now have some significantly smaller classes, and they’re a lot easier to […]