mattvanhorn

6 ms·

1.
by mattvanhorn 10y ago
Wow, Upwork comes out looking worse than the asshole who was abusing the system. Wasn't expecting that. Guess the world is just full of assholes and their enablers.
2.
by mattvanhorn 11y ago
Real programming ended with Mel.
3.
by mattvanhorn 11y ago
tl;dr: "Conceptual debt" is what Ward Cunningham described as "technical debt". That thing you call "technical debt" is just a combination of bad habits, haste and apathy.
4.
by mattvanhorn 11y ago
Tell them to subpoena you - then the choice to testify is not yours any more. You'll have to. But you can tell future employers that you were forced, if you'd like to.
5.
by mattvanhorn 12y ago
I'm terribly saddened by this. It's a great genre bookstore, and although I have a kindle, I still love having dead tree books, especially ones I read for pleasure.
6.
by mattvanhorn 12y ago
I worked at a place where the VPE would talk about technical debt as a mortgage. Yet they had a culture that abhorred paying down the debt through refactoring, and so it was more like one of those interest-only payment mortgages. They paid
7.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I suppose that if you do keep things that small, it could work well to trash and rewrite. Plus it has the benefit of making you consider explicitly what is going/staying. Personally, I like my tests to be pretty clearly about the behav
8.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I agree with the general approach suggested in the article (in tests, write/assume the code you wish you had). But one detail ran counter to my personal practice. I don't believe that "symmetrical" unit tests are a worth
9.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I think that Red-Green-Refactor is as much about learning to habitually look for and recognize the refactoring opportunities as it is about being meticulous in reacting to those opportunities. It's true that nothing forces your to refa
10.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
If "the design in your head" involves classes or functions, or any programming language dependent ideas, then it you are not doing TDD. I call this style test-first, or pseudo TDD. But if the design in your head is an algorithm t
11.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I think far too many people fail to make the distinction between designing an algorithm and designing a program (which implements it). This is why I have to watch co-workers create dozens of useless error classes and utility functions, and
12.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
Only TDD the code that you don't want to waste time debugging later. Skip the parts where you have proven no edge cases exist. Skip the parts you are sure will never, ever, need to be changed for any reason whatsoever.
13.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I still do a lot of decent work on a non-unibody MBP from 2008, so I think a 2009 model would still have some utility, but I would consider the price carefully - it might be more worth it to buy a newer MB air or something, knowing you&#x27
14.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I don't find implementing the tests very difficult at all - but I am comfortable with regular expressions, and ruby. It's no more burden to write step definitions than it is to write RSpec directly. I use SOLID OOP to write my tes
15.
A Case For Cucumber(mattvanhorn.com)
1 points by mattvanhorn 13y ago|0 comments
16.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I've posted a response here: http://mattvanhorn.com/2013/09/19/a-case-for-cucumber/
17.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
If you wear it, I can choke you with it. Also, don't confuse the sport with the art - the old vale tudo fights allowed everything but eye gouging and biting, but even those would not make much of a difference to a skilled practitioner. htt
18.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
I was listening to Robson Moura (BJJ black belt) talk about why he loves the art so much. He said something like: when you walk out of a karate class, after a lot of sparring, you feel like a tough-guy who's ready to kick some ass, but when
19.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
See also: http://acerminaro.blogspot.com/2007/05/ritual-cat-and-other-...
20.
by mattvanhorn 13y ago
full disclosure: (I work for New Relic now) I've also used New Relic developer mode to identify requests that have too many queries, and optimize them. At my last job I cut the queries on the homepage by 75% this way. I also used it to loo
21.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
Personally, I'd like to see some of the smart folks in the community assist the police in identifying the source of the threats and helping to ensure that those miscreants get jail time.
22.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
In the words of Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven: "'Deserve's got nothin' to do with it" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg ) I'm "entitled" to a market rate. I'm also "entitled" to negotiate for the highest rate the marke
23.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
answer() has a void return, although I suppose you might be able to watch System.out to see if it worked.
24.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
...and that you can remove all the existing ones and insert your own.
25.
Timid Development - a dysfunctional process(mattvanhorn.com)
1 points by mattvanhorn 14y ago|0 comments
26.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
Here's my work flow: I write a specification (using RSpec) of some behavior. It fails. Then I write code to make that specification pass. Now the code is working correctly, as I have defined it. Then I refactor, using my specs (tests) as a
27.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
I won't write tests for getters and setters, but then again, I try not to write getters and setters very much in the first place.
28.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
Actually, that is a great metaphor. But you should know, TDD is the way I repeatedly sample and appraise my work as I go. Multiple times per hour, in fact. Red -> Green is the sampling and Green -> Refactor is the appraising.
29.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
It's Test Driven Development - not Proof Of Correctness. The worst thing about TDD having 'test' in the name is that people think it is about preventing bugs, or catching them. It is not. It is about enabling easy refactoring. The other stu
30.
by mattvanhorn 14y ago
I can only speak from my experience (20 years) of developing web apps, but I've never seen a cohesive, loosely coupled web app, that was both over 2 years old AND not using some form of TDD.

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