Chris Stuff
Category Archives: Rant
When should you test?
When it provides value. When is that? It depends. I wish it were simpler than “it depends” but this is unfortunately the truth. Our profession isn’t surgery. It isn’t engineering. It isn’t painting. It isn’t sculpture. It isn’t carpentry. It … Continue reading
Serialization madness, Unicode edition
Yesterday we were debugging an issue in XML serialization where only a portion of the document was getting deserialized before we encountered an error. It was a strange error, where it looked like when reading the XML the XML document … Continue reading
Respect and the 40-hour work week
A post on Hacker News this week caught my eye, lamenting the loss of the 40-hour work week. In particular, the plight of information workers was highlighted as one of the few remaining industries that regularly asks its workers to … Continue reading
Why Source Control Matters and Hopefully it’s Git
I had an interesting and fun discussion last week with my fellow Headspring employees. I’m a big advocate of using git and I’m also the type of person that likes clean code and clean commits. Combining these two things and … Continue reading
Also posted in Best Practices, Continuous Improvement, git, Project Management
Tagged clean code, dvcs, git
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Newline at end of file
This is just me asking a question in public and doing as little research on the subject as possible, but why wouldn’t you want a newline character at the end of a file? There are several reasons why I can … Continue reading
Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won
Why? Because since at least Visual Studio 2005, the default for tabs/spaces has been: Insert spaces, not “Keep tabs”. If tabs were supposed to win, they would have won the default settings battle. If the default settings in Visual Studio … Continue reading
The grand No Flash experiment (update)
My dislike of Flash has been well documented, so last month I thought I would try to see what the internet was like without Flash installed, whatsoever. I removed Flash completely from my system, including any Chrome plugin (Chrome has … Continue reading
Formula for project success
In light of recent conversations around ActiveRecord and Rails, I thought it might be important to recognize the factors in a project success, in terms of the code produced: In order for a software project to be successful, two things … Continue reading
A grand experiment
Flash has crashed for the (hopefully) last time. I’m going to run a little experiment. I’m uninstalling Flash and see how much it affects browsing experience for say, one month. I suspect that most experiences will be fine on Chrome, … Continue reading
Software Features, Pick One
A few months back I saw a tweet that stuck with me. It was from Alton Brown. I’m not a foodie, but for some reason, this one stuck in my head. I think it’s because it resonated in other parts … Continue reading →