The Third Bit

The Jan/Feb 2006 issue of American Scientist, the magazine of Sigma Xi, contains an article on Software Carpentry.

Software Carpentry, Writing

Book reviews by our very own Jorge Aranda and Laura MacDougall are now on the DDJ web site. (Unfortunately, they’re behind a paywall, but trust me, they’re spiffalicious.)

Writing

Jon Erickson, the editor-in-chief of Doctor Dobb’s Journal, asked me to write a couple of paragraphs about a typical developer’s typical day. As usual, I went a little overboard; unusually, I veered toward the bright side.

It’s 9:30. You’ve caught up on email from the contractors in India, skimmed a dozen blog postings, and finished your first cup of coffee: time to get to work. Open Eclipse, and check your working copy against the repository. Hm… Maria and Sukhmeet have checked in changes to the charting module. Two clicks takes you to the web page that shows the results of the overnight build and smoke tests. Total coverage has dropped slightly, but the new functionality is being tested, so you update and recompile.

Next, you flip over to the bug tracking web page, and re-read the description that Bin in QA filed against the password strength checker. “Doesn’t recognize digits immediately following non-Latin characters.” OK, that’s probably a character encoding problem. You write a unit test, copy and paste the Chinese character passwords Bin used to find the problem, set a couple of breakpoints, and dive in.

By 11:00, you know that the problem is something to do with the LDAP server not reporting encodings correctly. You have to put it aside for a while, though, because there’s a 1:00 meeting to review the schedule estimates for the new biometrics module, and you want to get forty minutes on the exercise bike downstairs before then. You print the requirements doc, get a fresh cup of coffee, and settle in with your favorite red pen.

3:00. The meeting ran well over time, but the pizza was good, and several important decisions were made. The minutes won’t be up on the project web site for checking until the end of the day, so you have at least a couple of hours to track down that encoding issue. You’re interrupted twice: once by the intern with a question about environment variables in Ant, and one by a phone call from a field engineer in Calgary, whom you redirect to second-line support. Despite that, you’re able to figure out that the admin UI isn’t setting the domain object properties correctly. A one-line change, two new unit tests, and a three-line check-in comment later, it’s 4:30, and you have half an hour in which to catch up with Joel Spolsky, Jon Udell, and the fine folks at Artima before catching the train home.

Writing

The first four Doctor Dobb’s Journal articles about Google’s Summer of Code projects are now on the web:

• Apache Axis2 JMX Front
• CL-GODB: A Common Lisp GO Database Manipulation Library
• Wide Character Support in NetBSD Curses Library
• gjournal: FreeBSD GEOM Journaling Layer

There are more queued up behind them, so stay tuned.

Coincidentally, my latest book reviews have also gone up:

• 37signals, Matthew Linderman, and Jason Fried: Defensive Design for the Web (New Riders, 2004, 073571410X).
• Bryan Basham, Kathy Sierra, and Bert Bates: Head First Servlets & JSP (O’Reilly & Associates, 2004, 0596005407 ).
• Stuart Langridge: DHTML Utopia: Modern Web Design Using JavaScript & DOM (SitePoint, 2005, 0957921896).
• Ian Langworth and chromatic: Perl Testing: A Developer’s Notebook (O’Reilly, 2005, 0596100922).
• Jared Richardson and William Gwaltney Jr.: Ship It! A Practical Guide to Successful Software Projects (The Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2005, 0974514047).
• Barry J. Rosenberg: Spring Into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists (Addison-Wesley, 2005, 0131498630).

Sunny and 69 degrees in San Francisco…

Writing

I’m collecting articles from participants in Google’s Summer of Code for Doctor Dobb’s Journal. We’re going to run 4-8 articles, each roughly 400 words long, for several months. It’s pretty cool stuff—I’m awed by the talent of the students who took part.

Writing

Focus on Java has just published an interview with me about Data Crunching.

Writing

The September 2005 issue of Doctor Dobb’s Journal has an article on testing web applications written by Sean Dawson and Kristin Kerr. Sean and Kristin did the work the article describes as a CSC49X project in Fall 2004.

Writing

Jon Udell has good things to say about Data Crunching. I’ve been a fan of Jon’s for years; I’m very flattered.

Writing

I seem to have a lot to say these days… This editorial on Doctor Dobb’s Journal‘s web site is about what to do with the coming wave of multi-core CPUs. (Hint: provide better debugger support.)

Writing

The title says it all: the review on Slashdot isn’t as flattering as I’d like, but then, having pointed out the deficiencies of so many other people’s books for so many years, I suppose that’s just fair…

Writing