Category Archives: design

This post is a follow up to Derick’s great post. I could not agree with his view point any more., but it struck a chord with me.  There is more to it. To actually call yourself a software engineer you … Continue reading →

Reading Ayende’s post on integrating Rhino Service Bus and RavenDB, one thing that caught my eye was the use of the ThreadStatic attribute to control the lifecycle of a private field: One of the things that really bothers me about … Continue reading →

Site design is an evolutionary process, like anything else. As new and updated information is needed on the site, the design must change to correctly display it. New functionality is also added on a regular basis, and things must be … Continue reading →

When one nurtures a production system for a long period of time, new requirements or examinations of existing behavior typically start with a set of assumptions of how the existing system should behave. However, I’ve often found that my assumptions … Continue reading →

Today I plan on writing a stored procedure. Not because I’m being forced to, but because the problem, as far as I can determine, requires a set-based solution. It’s a once-a-month process, doing bulk import, update and export of up … Continue reading →

I’m looking at a database table this morning, looking to optimize a few queries by adding some indexes. The trouble is, this table already has many indexes, all on different columns. So now I’m thinking, is this a smell that … Continue reading →

One of my favorite posts by Ayende covers the idea of concepts and features.  Design occurs at the concept level, whereas features build on top of concepts.  This can be a little abstract, but I recently ran into a situation … Continue reading →

I recently read Chris Coyier’s article entitled Show Markup in CSS Comments. I was actually a bit angry that so many responses praised this and so few were turned off from the idea. I appreciate the idea of making things … Continue reading →

A popular cause the Agile folks like to rally against is the idea of a Big Design Up Front (BDUF).  But much like Waterfall, the people doing BDUF will hardly admit that it’s BDUF that they’re doing.  Instead, you’re much … Continue reading →

While prepping for the Headspring MVC Boot Camp last week, I had a couple of choices for getting the examples project up and going.  I wanted the examples to use an actual domain model, a real IoC tool, and a … Continue reading →