First, by reflection...

Tonight, I came home and pulled into the driveway as usual and put the tranny in park and turned off the ignition. I've done this a thousand times in my 2005 POS Ford Focus. Pull in, put it in park, turn off, take key, leave. However, tonight, the key did not come out. It felt like I could not turn it all the way to the 0 off position. Turn the ignition back on; start the car; put the transmission in various gears. No luck, the key would not come out.

My first clue to trouble was that I could shift the transmission out of Park without stepping on the brake first to release the Shift/Lock interlock that prevents folks from shifting the car into a moving gear without realizing the consequences and having your foot on the brake pedal. There's a spot next to the shift lever to unlock the interlock device if it's stuck but I had the opposite problem. It was stuck off.

via bgr.com

via bgr.com

For all the bravado behind the idyllic synergy behind the Steve Job's Reality Distortion Field, the cracks are beginning to form after his death. These aren't the first signs. I think the message has changed significantly around their core products. Under Steve's rule, we never would have seen an iPad that was thicker, even marginally, than its predecessor. There would be no discussion of A5, A6, O69 processors; Steve preferred to keep those details away from the consumer.

When a rule is barely understood, that’s a problem. When a rule is applied in seemingly counter-intuitive fashion, that’s a problem. When a rule causes fans to flip out, littering the field with debris and causing an 18-minute delay, that’s a problem.

via msn.foxsports.com

There Are No Controllers In Backbone

There simply aren’t. In spite of the documentation saying that routers or view may be sort of maybe almost kind of close to some of what a controller might do, there are no controllers. It’s not a construct that exists in the backbone namespace, and there’s no implementation that represents what a controller does, architecturally.

A router is not a controller. It’s a router. A view is not a controller. It’s a view. Yes, both routers and controllers share some of what a traditional MVC framework would call a controller. No, neither of these is a controller.

More MVP Than MVC

I’ve spent 5 years building MV* family applications in thick-client / GUI systems (Windows / WinForms / WinMobile) and on the web (Rails, ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, etc). Backbone clearly fits in to this family, but it’s also clearly not MVC. My opinion says that it’s closer to MVP, where the backbone view is closer to a P (presenter) and the HTML/DOM is the V (view).

Consider this picture of an MVC process flow (from Wikipedia):

Here, the models contain data which is used to populate views. Actions that a user initiates are handled by the controller which processes the request and updates the models. The models are then fed back to the views and the cycle starts over. It’s cyclical in nature.

And now consider this picture of an MVP process flow (from LessThanDot.com):

Notice the difference? Right – it’s not circular. That’s the big difference between MVC and plain-jane MVP (a.k.a. “passive view“). MVP does not work in a circular fashion the way MVC does. Instead, it relies on a presenter (the “P” in MVP) to be the coordinating brains of the operation. The presenter in an MVP app is responsible for taking the data from the models and stuffing it in to the views. Then when an action is taken on the view, the presenter intercepts it and coordinates the work with the other services, resulting in changes to models. The presenter then takes those model changes and pushes them back out to the view, and the elevator of moving data up and down the architectural stack begins again.

Does the idea and responsibility of a presenter sound familiar when thinking about Backbone? It should… it fits almost concept for concept with Backbone’s views, in my mind. But that doesn’t mean Backbone is an MVP implementation, either. It only means that views should be thought of as presenters, not controllers.

via lostechies.com

No one likes code conditionals, right? They're difficult to read, extend, and maintain; primarily because they intermingle data with logic. They're why we put up with bloated IOC containers, just to be able to avoid using switch and nested if statements. In JavaScript, we have a better way. Here's a typical switch statement in JS:

var label = switch (dataTypeId) { case 'revenue' : 'Thousands of USD'; break; case 'census' : 'Number of Customers'; break; case 'inventory' : 'Hundreds of Units'; break; default: ''; }

So we have to deal with ubiquitous break token, the extra case structure, and lengthy code bloat to make a simple decision. Got code smell? Here's the alternative, use object prototypal extension and JSON interpretation to create a hash instead.

var labelOptions = { 'revenue' : 'Thousands of USD', 'census' : 'Number of Customers', 'inventory' : 'Hundred of Units' } var label = labelOptions[dataTypeId] || '';

I grew up in a box-centric culture at Apple. If I'd grown up in a network-centric culture, like Sun, HyperCard might have been the first Web browser. My blind spot at Apple prevented me from making HyperCard the first Web browser.

via arstechnica.com

As the 25th anniversary of HyperCard approaches, ars technica takes a look back at the cool little program that could. I remember being a college freshman with my first Macintosh (Classic) in 1990 trying to figure out this desktop and GUI. HyperCard was instrumental in helping me understand this computing paradigm. Being able to put media and content on each Card and linking them into stacks.

Of course, as a comic book geek at the time, my first task was to catalog my collection. After some two months of effort, in between lectures, parties, and sleep, I finally had my first HyperCard array of my collection of New Mutants, Batman, and Grendel. I had fields for issue number, date, condition. How I longed for a way to capture an image of the actual book!

"I think what has changed," agrees my Anonymous Female Tech Authority, "is that engineers are thought of as awkward tech nerds with glasses. And now they are beer-slugging dudes who stare at sales ladies' boobs."

via gizmodo.com

via youtube.com

Gross margin was 47.4 percent compared to 41.4 percent in the year-ago quarter

via businesswire.com

Real life grown-up August Gloop

via buzzfeed.com

At a lot companies, this is where you’d see me writing something like, “so I’ve decided to leave $COMPANY, take a sabbatical, and then join $OTHER_COMPANY to find new challenges.” At Fog Creek, that’s not how it works. Joel and Michael have a strong attitude that good developers should be rewarded as developers. When I went to them and told them that I wanted to get new experiences and get back into the writing part of writing software, they were really happy to make that happen.

via bitquabit.com

Testing like the TSA David Apr 11

84 comments Latest by Cássio Marques

When developers first discover the wonders of test-driven development, it’s like gaining entrance to a new and better world with less stress and insecurity. It truly is a wonderful experience well worth celebrating. But internalizing the benefits of testing is only the first step to enlightenment. Knowing what not to test is the harder part of the lesson.

While as a beginner you shouldn’t worry much about what not to test on day one, you better start picking it up by day two. Humans are creatures of habit, and if you start forming bad habits of over-testing early on, it will be hard to shake later. And shake them you must.

“But what’s the harm in over-testing, Phil, don’t you want your code to be safe? If we catch just one bug from entering production, isn’t it worth it?”. Fuck no it ain’t, and don’t call me Phil. This line of argument is how we got the TSA, and how they squandered billions fondling balls and confiscating nail clippers.

Tests aren’t free (they cost a buck o’five) Every line of code you write has a cost. It takes time to write it, it takes time to update it, and it takes time to read and understand it. Thus it follows that the benefit derived must be greater than the cost to make it. In the case of over-testing, that’s by definition not the case.

Think of it like this: What’s the cost to prevent a bug? If it takes you 1,000 lines of validation testing to catch the one time Bob accidentally removed the validates_presence_of :name declaration, was it worth it? Of course not (yes, yes, if you were working on an airport control system for launching rockets to Mars and the rockets would hit the White House if they weren’t scheduled with a name, you can test it—but you aren’t, so forget it).

The problem with calling out over-testing is that it’s hard to boil down to a catchy phrase. There’s nothing succinct like test-first, red-green, or other sexy terms that helped propel test-driven development to its rightful place on the center stage. Testing just what’s useful takes nuance, experience, and dozens of fine-grained heuristics.

Seven don’ts of testing But while all that nuance might have a place in a two-hour dinner conversation with enlightened participants, not so much in a blog post. So let me firebomb the debate with the following list of nuance-less opinions about testing your typical Rails application:

Don’t aim for 100% coverage.

Code-to-test ratios above 1:2 is a smell, above 1:3 is a stink.

You’re probably doing it wrong if testing is taking more than 1/3 of your time. You’re definitely doing it wrong if it’s taking up more than half.

Don’t test standard Active Record associations, validations, or scopes.

Reserve integration testing for issues arising from the integration of separate elements (aka don’t integration test things that can be unit tested instead).

Don’t use Cucumber unless you live in the magic kingdom of non-programmers-writing-tests (and send me a bottle of fairy dust if you’re there!)

Don’t force yourself to test-first every controller, model, and view (my ratio is typically 20% test-first, 80% test-after).

Given all the hundreds of books we’ve seen on how to get started on test-driven development, I wish there’d be just one or two that’d focus on how to tame the beast. There’s a lot of subtlety in figuring out what’s worth testing that’s lost when everyone is focusing on the same bowling or bacon examples of how to test.

But first things first. We must collectively decide that the TSA-style of testing, the coverage theater of quality, is discredited before we can move forward. Very few applications operate at a level of criticality that warrant testing everything.

In the wise words of Kent Beck, the man who deserves the most credit for popularizing test-driven development:

I get paid for code that works, not for tests, so my philosophy is to test as little as possible to reach a given level of confidence (I suspect this level of confidence is high compared to industry standards, but that could just be hubris). If I don’t typically make a kind of mistake (like setting the wrong variables in a constructor), I don’t test for it.

via 37signals.com

The Free Universal Construction Kit

via fffff.at

How awesome is this? Having loved Legos as a kid and seeing all the new generation of construction toys my boys have to play with today, these are a dream come true. Now we can mate Tinkertoys to Legos to Lincoln Logs all in the same piece! The Free Universal Construction Kit is a set of 80 interoperability adapters between 10 popular construction toys including the aforementioned sets.

I've heard many times how software and the people (architects, designers, developers, testers, et al) that make it happen is the currency of the future. How companies and industries will have to learn to do more with less and make up the difference with software. The other side of that equation see it that companies are replacing people with robots and processes. So how are we, the implementers of software, supposed to operate in order to be most effective? The Agile process has taught us our goal should not be to create perfect software but to gather feedback to eliminate the bad software. Well, what if those giving the feedback are incentivized to not give genuinely useful feedback since it's quite possibly their job they are eliminating?

My task as a developer is to decompose a complex problem into easily solved or solvable problems that limited computer logic can accomplish that task. I can spend the time to learn the business domain as well as the back of my hand or, more often, rely on business analysts, product owners, subject matter experts to fill in that gap. The problem that I've seen in more than one Line-Of-Business application is that those people may not be in the best position to offer constructive feedback. Professionals, which is anyone who gets paid to perform a task, want to feel valued. They want to be the keeper of the "secret sauce" that makes the machine work so well. They don't want their contributions reduced to the sum of its elementary parts. It devalues their effort, experience, and training. They don't want to see their legion reduced or eliminated by process or software.

I hope this can be a wake-up call. Make killing people in terrifying and unstoppable ways the focal point of your business again. Without it you will not exist. Weed out the morally bankrupt people, no matter how much non-existent Alderaan real estate they sell. And get the culture right again, so people want to make millions of voices cry out in terror before being suddenly silenced.

via thedailymash.co.uk