2014 statistics

So what did you enjoy in 2014. Here are the truth based on statistics.

A kingdom for a developer

So this happened a few years ago in the days between Christmas and New Year. I was using the slow days after Christmas to get some work done in the office when suddenly a guy from the operations team came running down the hallways shouting "a developer, a developer, a kingdom for a developer"!

Do you really want to properly implement TAP?

There is one part of implementing an API using TAP that I've always found cumbersome and that is the guideline to throw argument exceptions before the task is started. I've always been glad that I never had to make the call since I haven't been developing externally available libraries, but recently I had an interesting discussion at work that made me reevaluate my standpoint. Maybe...

Never hide a TUF in a TUC

This slogan (never hide a TUF in a TUC) was introduced (to me at least) in 2010 by Michael Feathers. Turns out it is a pretty good tool to explain and steer people in the right direction when they are new to writing unit tests. But what is TUF and TUC?

Faking 3rd party dependencies

When it comes to dealing with third party dependencies in my code I've used the same trick for a long time. But I was recently introduced to a new trick that I have mixed feelings about.

The ProducerConsumerStream

I just wanted to let you know that I got a good idea and renamed the NoMemoryStream.

The Good Diagnostics Paradox

If you want your system to have good diagnostics (aka logging) I find there is a kind of catch-22 in achieving it. And that is regardless of if we are thinking about diagnostics in order to understand why things went wrong or if it is to do business analysis. And rather than calling it catch-22 I'll call it a paradox. Because it sounds cooler...

The NoMemoryStream

The say there are two hard problems in computer science; cache invalidation, naming things and off by one errors. Hence I can proudly present the NoMemoryStream.

First vs Middle names or how the US immigration renamed me

For anybody planning to move to the US I have one important recommendation; sort out your name situation before you apply for visas etc. The US is obsessed with your name since it and your birth date more or less identifies you.

When do your chickens show up?

One thing with Scrum that I never really saw happen was chickens showing up for the daily stand-up and get a feel for where the team was heading. Essentially I never saw chickens other than in sprint demos. That was until recently.