I’ve seen a few recordings of developers performing code katas lately and decided to try recording one myself.
It was quite a different experience in several ways. Especially the feeling of stage fright that came upon me as soon I hit “Rec”.
Anyway, a few weeks ago I saw a recording by Chris Parsons, performing a nice version of “Back to the Checkout” and wanted to try a slightly different approach, using separate objects for the Checkout and the PricingRules.
Configuration files of integration and test servers are often accessible by all team members. This is a good thing, as changes to configuration can be made quickly without holding up the test process while having to wait for a system administrator to make the necessary changes.
But what I have often found is that the same servers seldom have proper backups of the important configuration files. I remember getting a lot of resistance from team members a few years ago when I suggested to use RCS to version control these files. RCS was not widely known and many found the syntax awkward, or at least hard to remember. But when I on top of this suggested to copy the configuration file tree to a disk on another server using rsync (to avoid the hassle of setting up a tape backup), I was sure to see my suggestion getting ignored.
Nowadays, git will easily perform both the version control task and the copy-to-remote-disk tasks. I use it for all my apache configuration files for example. One of the servers I administer acts as a proxy for several web applications that each are have very different virtual server configurations. With a version control for the entire tree in place it feels very relaxing making changes to individual applications when I know I can always roll back, should I mess up.
From my server with a real taped backup system in place I simply git pull my various git repositories using cron…and sleep well, knowing all my configuration changes are version controlled and backed up on tape.
I often recommend developers at my clients to form Book Study Groups. The efficiency of learning together can’t be valued enough.
Often I am asked to recommend a couple of books to read in this manner and all though there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to that, I have noticed that a few books are almost always on my lists.
I decided to post a list of recommendations on various topics at different skill levels. (Books specific to a particular programming language have been ignored and the list is sorted by book title.)
(I should also hint that I will probably add The Productive Programmerby Neal Ford to this list soon. I haven’t read the complete book yet but it seems promising. You can check out a QCon presentation held by the author from last year at InfoQ.)
I’d rather not make a big mission statement about what I’m gonna put here but it’s very likely it will be much more on professional topics than personal.
As I don’t really follow more than a handful of blogs I consider myself a newbie blogger. As such, years of procrastination preceded setting this thing up until I finally got to the point where I just chose a product, installed it and got going. (Not really the whole truth. I spent a fair amount of time looking at plugins for posting source code in blog entries.)
Anyway, the blogging software is installed and the blog is public.
Better get started, instead of wasting valuable writing time figuring out the details of how this WordPress stuff really works and spending way to much time fiddling with the features.