I Built His Cage

Announcer: Now for quick hits and commentary on software development topics from around the web, the EIP web-ring brings you the stigmatized spawn of a refactory, MoffDub, and Helltime!

• Kevin Rodrigues of Complete Coding advises on 7 steps to writing bug free code. Step #4 would enrage likely the likes of Martin Fowler, Uncle Bob, and most TDD evangelists: “Debug through your code”. One of the benefits of test-first development is that you “rarely need to fire up the debugger”. It’s a strange fix, this one – I’m sure if you followed TDD as closely as you can, this will end up being true. But if you’re a T.I.N.O. like me, then this piece of advice is right on. I make sure I step through code so I can make sure what I think is happening is actually happening, and what I wrote a test for is actually being tested.
• From the blog of Nelson Elhage: Lab Notebooking for the Software Engineer. He then proceeds to contradict the title of the post by advising on “keeping a lab notebook as a computer scientist”. So tread with caution.

  Aside from this here blog, I have found a couple of other notebooking mechanisms: code comments and a refactoring “wish list.” You see, we got so much grief from management about refactoring that my supervisor advised me to stop mentioning it at scrum and simply do it anyway. So we used a simple spreadsheet to track refactoring tasks as they occurred to us during normal development. The resolutions to such tasks sometimes are to do nothing, and when that happened, we noted the reasons in the spreadsheet and, if applicable, in the code as well.

• The knights of Royal Pingdom took a ride through the shire of Facebook to survey the code behind it. One of the most interesting technologies featured is HipHop, a PHP-to-C++ compiler. It brings back memories of when we wrote Pascal-to-C-minus compilers in college. Also not surprising is the reliance on the key-value model for storage, even when they make use of something like MySQL.

  I’d like to hear a bit more about how other enterprises, like Facebook, deploy their code to the outside world. I sometimes wonder if we’re unique in the fact that our deployments involve “shifts” that begin at 3 a.m., end at 7 p.m., and last a week.

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