I’ve just closed my laptop after a full day of meetings — roadmap reviews, architecture decisions, a particularly spirited debate over boundaries of our capabilities. The kind of day where you talk little about code and write even less of it. I’ve spent over twenty-five years in this industry. I started writing code when hard drives were measured in megabytes (my brother yelled at me for consuming couple of kilobytes of memory on his brand new Seagate hard drive on his 286), when “the web” meant blinking text on Netscape, and when the height of programmer ambition was getting your *.bas program…
Category: <span>Tutorial</span>
Why TDD? Test-Driven Development flips the usual workflow on its head: instead of writing code and then testing it, you write a failing test first, then write just enough code to make it pass, then clean up. The result is a growing suite of tests that document exactly what the code must do — and a codebase that is only as complex as the tests demand. We will build a classic toy app — a Magic 8-Ball (Github)— from scratch using this discipline. The Red → Green → Refactor Cycle Every increment of TDD follows three phases: Phase Goal 🔴…
I recently purchased a CyberPower CST135XLU Uninterruptible Power Supply (UPS) for my linux server, Orbi Wifi Router, and Synology NAS. However, I only need my Orbi running on UPS in the event of a power outage; the others don’t need to be running. With my Fios on a dedicated UPS and Orbi on this new UPS, I will be able to stay on line while I wait for the power to be restored. This means I need to setup Network UPS Tools (NUT) so that I can gracefully shutdown my Synology NAS and linux server – giving my Orbi extended…
In my original Tetris code base, I started out with a simple RotationController class. As I recall, this was a trivial class with a single shape. However, as more shapes were added, it quickly became unwieldy. Looking back at this code, I want to cringe at my lack of discipline in following proper design principles. On the bright side, I have something to blog about. Chain of Responsibility The chain of responsibility design pattern is known as a behavioral pattern consisting of client objects and a series of handler objects. It provides more than one object the opportunity to handle a request by…
It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with Gradle. Once I was introduced to it, I never looked back. It was the same with Ant as I transitioned from Make. But, Gradle is different. I always felt building was necessary evil. It was often done way after first code was ever written. This isn’t true with Gradle. Before any code is written, I start every project by setting up my Gradle build. I actually look forward to adding more features to my build. How crazy is that?! WSDL to JavaRecently, I published one of my old SharePoint…