CS and the City

Douglas Crockford, Yahoo!’s JavaScript Architect, gives a great introduction to “the world’s most misunderstood programming language.”

It’s a four part-er so I’ve included the links for your benefit rather than a mass embedding of the videos:
The JavaScript Programming Language (1 of 4)
The JavaScript Programming Language (2 of 4)
The JavaScript Programming Language (3 of 4)
The JavaScript Programming Language (4 of 4)
Presenation slides (Warning: ZIP link)

I highly recommend you watch it all. There is much in the way of background explaining just why features of JavaScript ended up the way they are, and a lot more to help Java veterans like myself create a proper mental model for JavaScript development.

Doug has also presented “Theory of the DOM” and “Advanced JavaScript” neither of which I have had the chance to take in yet. You can check them all out on Yahoo! Video.

Side note: I don’t like Yahoo! Video nearly as much as its competitors. The base player stalled out on me and wouldn’t let me advance to my previous place in the video when I restarted. I suspect it’s linearly buffering the content in the background and that was the issue, but there’s absolutely no indication that I’ve run out of buffered content or how much buffering has been completed.

My Team Lead asked me to do a little digging into Service Oriented Architecture before my co-op term wrapped up. I got a copy of Service-Oriented Archiecture by Thomas Erl from the library and starting flipping through it. Some CTO/CIOs don’t understand their developers disdain for Enterprise buzzwords, but I can sum this one up for them in one sentence I discovered in Erl’s text (top of page 37):

“The application of service-orientation principles to processing logic results in standardized service-oriented processing logic.”

At first glance, it reads like an impressive sales pitch. But at second, you realize there is absolutely no content whatsoever in that sentence. None. It is completely devoid of any useful information. Coders find beauty in simplicity. Enterprisiness is anti-beautiful.

My very first tech conference has come and gone. Agile was about as good of a subject as any to start with. We use Scrum at work, but I walked into it by accident; I don’t have any formal Agile background, so it was great to get a little more feel for the depth and breadth of the area.

We don’t follow Scrums practices religiously, instead we concentrate on the principles. We’ve adopted the daily stand-up meetings and the concept of a product backlog, but we have tweaked it quite a bit to allow us to scale the team to the size it is now. I was comforted to hear that most people are using their own version of Agile rather than big bang adopting one laid out by the book.

For the most part, I stuck to the “People trump Process” track, which concentrated mostly on project management. A lot of good war stories, especially by Carl Schmidt (Riptown Media), although maybe it was just his fancy Mac presentation.

I was a little bit disappointed by the amount of concrete value of some of the presentations. For example, Linda Rising gave the Keynote for the second day on The Power of Retrospectives. Now, I’ve never heard of Retrospectives as a software technique, but it took me about half the presentation to realize all she was talking about was reflecting on past projects. She did talk a bit about a technique for using timelines to help, but I would have like to get more information on all the concepts that fall under the Retrospectives umbrella. If there are two books on it, then there’s got to be more meat to add to her presentation. I found Mary Poppendieck’s “Why Agile” was also a bit light on the concrete tools stuff, although the history of software processes was very interesting.

My first exploration of the “Tools and Techniques” track wasn’t until the second day with Scott Ambler’s “Agility in the Database” which I thoroughly enjoyed. I haven’t done a whole lot of database work, but I’m considering picking up his Refactoring Databases book as an idea of what sort of problems I may want to watch out for when I do any simplistic design.

Scott’s talk on “Time to Address the Uncomfortable Issues We’d Prefer to Avoid” was good, although I disagreed with a few points he had. I’ll address them in a separate post though.

All in all, well worth the student rate. Next year, maybe they’ll have more comfortable chairs.

Today’s coding practices tip (as if this is a regular thing) comes from Michael Feathers at Artima Developer. He writes an article on the perils of playing pass the hot null in your code:

“[using null checks] …just means that you’re dealing with bad code: you’re dealing with code where people are actively making extra work for themselves and making code brittle in the process.”

Read the entire piece here. Something I’ll have to consider. I’d like to see him flesh out his argument for using null objects such as empty arrays and strings rather than nulls. I see his point that it can help handle the exceptional case graceful, but I think that nulls may have their proper place. It’s easier to check for a null than to check if a string .equals(“”).

I spent today reading up on Ant (Java Build Environment) and CruiseControl (Continuous Integration Framework). I’ve run across CruiseControl in a few past jobs, but never worked with it directly. I was actually quite surprised to find that it is an open source project as I’ve always found it to be sophisticated.

In my travels today I stumbled upon Buildix. Buildix puts Subversion, CruiseControl, and Trac on a live disc (ala Knoppix). I’m really impressed with the integration of the layers. I would love to see Apple distribute this packaged with their servers. This would definitely set them apart in terms of development environments for small and medium sized dev shops.

Found at Raible Designs

I've been using source control for a while now, but I've only recently discovered that my little iBook comes pre-installed with a working copy of CVS. In fact, Apple's developer site has a great article on how to set up CVS on OSX.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't take the user beyond using CVS at the command line. Ideally, you'll want to connect to your CVS repository using a much more flexible GUI tool. I forcibly recommend using Eclipse. The integration of CVS directly into an IDE has been a long time coming, but I can't give it up now that it's here.

Read the rest of this entry »