It was almost too beautiful a weekend to spend indoors, however, I was still able to check out the Fall Home Show at the Better Living Center building in Exhibition place this past weekend. Highlights included the moment a sales rep approached a kitchen brand booth to inquire whether their large advert outside was [...]Tagi: sales rep, advert, ace, better living center, fall home show
Bamboo Flooring
As environmental pollution and global warming become a daily reality, people are becoming more concerned about their impact on the environment. Beginning with the home, people are seeking new ways to beautify their house without damaging the environment. The first great place to begin is with your floors. Bamboo flooring can [...]Tagi: bamboo flooring, global warming, new ways, ace, peoe
Not long ago, I was sitting across from the CEO of a media company. He showed enormous pride in the social value of his organization - in delivering news to the world via a global team of thoughtful, award-winning journalists.
He asked what made me proud to be at Sun. Among a number of things, I said I'm proudest of the role Sun plays in making sure stories like his are told - "Our technologies, after all, are how your journalists file their stories, and we play a central role in how you present them to the world via the network." I am unreservedly proud of Sun's role in making the world a more open, transparent place.
Beyond professional journalism, the network is a social utility for the world's citizenry - whose digital cameras and cell phones and blog postings and emails form a tidal wave of transparency. We live in a world whose traumas and triumphs are visible instantaneously. Sunlight's not just a great disinfectant, it's a wonderful safety net, too - you can't fix the problems you don't know about. But once you know about a problem, even small attempts to help, multiplied over the long tail of the internet, can make an extraordinary difference.
Over the past few days, the world has watched an earthquake in China lead to the death and dislocation of countless thousands. The San Francisco Bay Area, where Sun is headquartered, has felt the impact deeply - beyond co-workers, friends and family, we've suffered our own traumas with earthquakes. A cyclone in Myanmar triggered similar thoughts among those of us effected by hurricanes in New Orleans, Louisiana.
But the world's an increasingly transparent place. And any help, from $1 to $1m, multiplied over the world, makes a difference.
Which is why I'm sending personal funds to the relief organizations I trust to bring aid to those stricken.
And I'm encouraging you to take the time to make a similar choice.
Tagi: enormous pride, phes, earthquake in china, countless thousands, delivering news, global team, ays, citizenry, traumas, tidal wave, digital cameras, safety net, earthquakes, triumphs, co workers, hurricanes, 1m, transparency, ace, sunlight
I consider this the golden rule of source control:
Check in early, check in often.
Developers who work for long periods -- and by long I mean more than a day -- without checking anything into source control are setting themselves up for some serious integration headaches down the line. Damon Poole concurs:
Developers often put off checking in. They put it off because they don't want to affect other people too early and they don't want to get blamed for breaking the build. But this leads to other problems such as losing work or not being able to go back to previous versions.My rule of thumb is "check-in early and often", but with the caveat that you have access to private versioning. If a check-in is immediately visible to other users, then you run the risk of introducing immature changes and/or breaking the build.
I'd much rather have small fragments checked in periodically than to go long periods with no idea whatsoever what my coworkers are writing. As far as I'm concerned, if the code isn't checked into source control, it doesn't exist. I suppose this is yet another form of Don't Go Dark; the code is invisible until it exists in the repository in some form.
I'm not proposing developers check in broken code -- but I also argue that there's a big difference between broken code and incomplete code. Isn't it possible, perhaps even desirable, to write your code and structure your source control tree in such a way that you can check your code in periodically as you're building it? I'd much rather have empty stubs and basic API skeletons in place than nothing at all. I can integrate my code against stubs. I can do code review on stubs. I can even help you build out the stubs!
But when there's nothing in source control for days or weeks, and then a giant dollop of code is suddenly dropped on the team's doorstep -- none of that is possible.
Developers that wouldn't even consider adopting the old-school waterfall method of software development somehow have no problem adopting essentially the very same model when it comes to their source control habits.
Perhaps what we need is a model of software accretion. Start with a tiny fragment of code that does almost nothing. Look on the bright side -- code that does nothing can't have many bugs! Test it, and check it in. Add one more small feature. Test that feature, and check it in. Add another small feature. Test that, and check it in. Daily. Hourly, even. You always have functional software. It may not do much, but it runs. And with every checkin it becomes infinitesimally more functional.
If you learn to check in early and check in often, you'll have ample time for feedback, integration, and review along the way. And who knows -- you might even manage to accrete that pearl of final code that you were looking for, too.
| [advertisement] Peer Code Review. No meetings. No busy-work. Customizable workflows and reports. Try Jolt Award-winning Code Collaborator. |
Tagi: rule of thumb, dollop, golden rule, stubs, coworkers, caveat, doorstep, rk, waterfall, poole, fragments, headaches, old school, repository, software development, ace, periods, developers, peoe, broken code
A couple months ago, my wife got a bee in her bonnet about us getting another cat. We already have two cats and a dog that could pretty much pass as one. However, my wife wouldn't relent, and I eventually caved.
A couple of weeks ago, we welcomed a Scottish Fold kitten into our zoo home. Coming up with a name for her was hard, just because I think my wife and I place a lot of importance in a name -- probably more so than most and definitely to a fault. However, we eventually arrived at "Fiona," and this is her:
You'd think at this point we'd be at capacity, but we can't forget the other little addition scheduled to show up two months from tomorrow.
Tagi: mths, fia, kitten, bnet, ace, zoo, cats