Category Archives: Rant

When should you test?

Posted on March 6, 2013 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

| 17 Comments

Serialization madness, Unicode edition

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

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Respect and the 40-hour work week

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

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Why Source Control Matters and Hopefully it’s Git

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Chris Missal

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 C# | 7 Comments

Software Features, Pick One

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Chris Missal

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 →

Also posted in Agile, Design | 2 Comments

Newline at end of file

Posted on March 23, 2012 by Chris Missal

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 →

Also posted in C#, Domain-Driven Design, Patterns | 1 Comment

Tabs versus spaces: Spaces won

Posted on March 7, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

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The grand No Flash experiment (update)

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

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Formula for project success

Posted on January 3, 2012 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

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A grand experiment

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Jimmy Bogard

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 →

| 11 Comments