Sleep Interrupted » programming

Tick follows tock

Andrew — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:56:15 +0000

Want to know what makes me tick? Blog posts like this and this. I love this kind of performance monitoring and optimisation work. Sometimes I wish this was what my job was all about.

The upshot of these particular posts? I think Firefox 3 is going to be very cool to play with.

The source code is the design

Andrew — Mon, 08 May 2006 19:34:04 +0000

For a long time I’ve been battling with the concept of round-trip engineering. It’s always seemed like overkill, because if you have sufficient design information to automate the code generation, you end up with a very cluttered model. In addition, none of the tools I’ve used have ever been able to capture sufficient detail; for example, sequence diagrams don’t even seem capable of dealing with simple constructs such as variable assignment. I know diagrams are nice, but aren’t you ultimately just swapping a text-based language for a diagram-based language. What’s the point of adding this extra layer to your process precisely?

Well, I think the final nail was put in the coffin for me when I read that the source code is the design. At least I know which side of the fence I sit on now.

By the way, this is the 100th post on Sleep Interrupted!

The Development Abstraction Layer

Andrew — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 19:14:33 +0000

Listen up, my Entreprenuer Friends. Yes, you know who you are. Joel has some important things to say to you about The Development Abstraction Layer. Some of you have probably read it already, even.

Which reminds me… About a year ago Mark asked me, “What are your top 10 books for programmers?” I hummed and hawed about that for a bit, drafted a blog post in my head, thought a bit about the question, drafted another blog post in my head, thought about just firing back another question… and never got round to actually taking any of it outside of my head.

Several months ago, randomly — okay, not randomly, via some long-lost blog post — I came across Joel’s management training program reading list. This had a few good, recognisable titles in, so I considered sending a link to Mark… and never got round to it.

Now, the whole point of this ramble is that while I was looking up the address for the link above, I came across Joel’s Programmer’s Bookshelf. This has books I’ve read and respect, books on my to-buy list, and books I think will be turning up there quite soon. It even has K&R, so Mark will be happy. Job done. Sorry about the wait.

Fairwell FFL

Andrew — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 20:14:13 +0000

After five and a half years on the web, http://www.fantasyfilmleague.com/ is no more. As the last active member of the FFL, I finally shut down the site a couple of days ago. We’ve handed over the domain, the code and the database to a good friend; hopefully the game, in some form or other, will come back soon.

It was fun but it was a slog. Eventually the slog outweighed the fun. I learnt a lot about how to run a site, from many perspectives: coding, administration, financial. If we failed anywhere, it was because we didn’t follow the mantra, be patient for growth but impatient for profit. We were impatient for growth and patient for profit, meaning we never broke even and that was the proverbially straw.

Java

Andrew — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 18:37:23 +0000

When Java first came out, I did a little programming in it to see what the fuss was all about. This was probably about 1995 and there’s no denying that it’s come a long way since then. But I’ve never really been able to get excited about it; languages I want to get into are Python and Ruby, or at the other end of the scale C#, so that I can play with Mono.

I could never quantify exactly what was putting me off, but now Chris Blizzard has posted a great argument about how Java’s licensing has harmed it. Having read it, I would have to agree and admit that the fragmentation and non-ubiquity of the run time environment are probably the largest turn-offs for me.

It Takes Three

Andrew — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 20:43:08 +0000

Daniel Glazman has an interesting post on the addition of transformation capabilities to CSS. I mention it, though, because of his thoughts in the final paragraph, which rung very true with my own experiences:

…you always have to bring a proposal three times on the table. The first time, it’s immediately rejected; the second time, it’s rejected but discussed; the third time, it’s accepted.

I’d not thought of it in these terms before, but it will certainly help me be more tenacious in future.

Exceptions

Andrew — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 21:43:49 +0000

I seem to have accrued a number of links to interesting posts on how exceptions aren’t the panacea many see them as. Firstly, an introduction to [the concept of conditions and restarts](http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/beyond-exception-handling-conditions-and-restarts.html ), which help seperate the recovery mechanism from the recovery policy. Then, there are some blog posts, firstly by [Joel Spolsky](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/) on [how exceptions are harmful like GOTO](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2003/10/13.html) and secondly in [The Old New Thing](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/default.aspx) on [how exception-based code is harder to write than return-value-based code](http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2005/01/14/352949.aspx). And of course, that lot sent me to the [Exception handling page on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_handling). There’s always more to read…

First Patch

Andrew — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:33:30 +0000

I’m getting *really* behind with the blogging, so here’s an attempt to catch up.

Exciting news! Well, for little old me anyway. A couple of weeks back I had my first ever patch to an open source project accepted and [checked in](http://cvs.freedesktop.org/hal/hal/fdi/information/10freedesktop/10-usb-music-players.fdi?r1=1.9&r2=1.10)! Go me! Okay, it’s only modifying a configuration file for the Linux [hardware abstraction layer](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction_layer) such that our Samsung YP-U1 music players are recognised as music players and not just generic USB storage devices, but it’s a first for me. My thanks go to [Danny Kukawka](http://dkukawka.blogspot.com/) for making the check-in on my behalf.

Enterprise Integration Patterns

Andrew — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 21:49:05 +0000

After many months I’ve finally finished reading [Enterprise Integration Patterns](http://www.enterpriseintegrationpatterns.com/). I wish it had existed when I was working at Syngenta, as it would have thrown light on several of the integration projects I did there. Of course, at the time I didn’t even think of them as Integration-with-an-I projects, but that’s the whole point. At least I can rewrite that part of my CV to be more buzzword compliant now.

I was a bit disappointed that the section on emerging web service standards for messaging was a bit thin on conclusions. It’s certainly not helped me shake the feeling that this morass of standards won’t make a lasting impact, at least not in the way invisaged by their authors.

Another book in the [Addison-Wesley Signature Series](http://www.awprofessional.com/series/series.asp?st=44126) is [Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture](http://www.martinfowler.com/books.html#eaa). I got this for Christmas — yes, I’m that exciting — and it looks to be superb. If I had a list of books for programmers (and that’s a whole other post coming soon) it would be in the section marked “Compulsory” along with things like [Design Patterns](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns).

Programming Miscellany

Andrew — Sun, 02 Oct 2005 20:50:43 +0000

I’ve been stockpiling some links to interesting articles, loosely programming related, so here they are in no particular order.

First up, an interesting article on the [Laws of Identity](http://www.identityblog.com/stories/2005/07/25/thelaws.html). This discusses the requirements of a successful identity system for the internet. Among other things, this includes why [Passport](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Passport_Network) didn’t succeed — normally not worth mentioning, except this is written by a Microsoft employee.

[Donald Norman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Norman), who brought you *The Design of Everyday Things*, tells us why [Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful](http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered_desig.html). While browsing round his site, I noticed he has a new book out, *Emotional Design*, which will certainly be on my to-read list.

[Joel Spolsky](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joel_Spolsky) tells us how to achieve [Painless Software Schedules](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000245.html). Interesting in that it largely matches the lessons I’ve learnt over several iterations of a project I’ve had to produces estimates for recently.

Now, I’ve not actually read it yet, but I do want to be able to answer the question [What Is Business Process Modeling?](http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/20/businessprocessmodeling.html)

All of the above have certainly come from posts on [Planet Mozilla](http://planet.mozilla.org/). My apologies for loosing track of the originating posts.