Category Archives: software development

Why Should I Learn TDD

I watched a good vid on TDD at InfoQ. Basically Keith Braithwaite explains in the beginning what I’ve been doing with this little Android project. Basically I’ve written some code, refactored the code, the written some more. Now that basic functionality and edge cases for it are pretty much handled, cleaning the code further becomes [...]

Disc Golf Drive Measure First Beta

For last couple of weeks I’ve been spending some time developing a small Android app for measuring disc golf drives during practice. At this point the software I would say that the software is in early beta and it has been tested only a bit in emulator and a bit with HTC Desire. This is [...]

Estimating: Frustration and Amusement

It goes like this: someone estimates how long it should take you to code a piece of software. You know the estimate is unrealistic and that no way you are going to make it. So you would imagine that you would just shrug your shoulders and code at whatever pace you are comfortable, not really [...]

Learning Programming Languages

I think learning new programming languages is both easy and very difficult. Syntax is nearly always easy, but understanding when to use a language and what are its strong points. Failing at this leads to the familiar “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.” On the other hand I [...]

Autosave in games

Earlier today I played Batman Arkham Asylum for a while and quit at some point. I’m about 80% through and just started the game to finish it tonight. No can do: corrupt save and that was that as there is only one save slot per “game”. The reason apparently is that I shut my Xbox [...]

Schwaber on Scrum

Scrum et al. – Ken Schwaber Really good presentation about scrum and the philosophy behind it. Great point about the implicit cutting of quality when it seems that project isn’t done at deadline. It’s a recurring theme in software project management literature, but bears repeating.

Commenting code

Recently there was a discussion on Slashdot about code comments. As always it’s mostly people building straw-men and all-out-attacking them. Still, entertaining read. My own commenting practice boils down to: code is up-to-date, hence better to write just verbose code than dense code and comment it explain the “why” in comments Ie. the general Clean [...]

Jack-Of-All or Master of Some

I’ve been reading the Coders at Work during Christmas and one thing keeps nagging at me: the expertise of the interviewed programmers is narrow. There are a few who are more of the Jack-Of-All variety, but most just have mostly done one thing, but done it a lot. This kinda leads to thinking how much [...]