Comments for LaneHolloway.com

Comment on Testing in Java: Part I – Introduction by Lane

Lane — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:46:52 +0000

Even with Selenium, testing the front-end JavaScript is still brittle. Unfortunately, I don’t think the front-end has quite the software engineering processes in place that the back-end has. It’s getting there but it isn’t there yet, the stigma of being a front-end developer needs to be removed before any serious testing and engineering sets in.

Comment on Testing in Java: Part I – Introduction by Hilario Barton

Hilario Barton — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 23:28:03 +0000

Paul Graham once quipped that “Web 2.0″ really meant “JavaScript now works”. Nearly ten years later, more and more functionality of our web applications is written in JavaScript. But for those of us who came of age when JavaScript was unreliable, it’s been preferable to test the server-side, while leaving the UI a thin-as-possible shell. Testing the front-end was error prone and brittle.

Comment on Testing in Java: Part I – Introduction by LaneHolloway.com - Testing in Java: Part II

LaneHolloway.com - Testing in Java: Part II — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 21:59:23 +0000

[...] the first part we talked about the domain objects and how to test a domain object. Now it’s time to look [...]

Comment on Book Review: Who Moved My Cheese? by LaneHolloway.com - Book Review: How to Light Up A Room

LaneHolloway.com - Book Review: How to Light Up A Room — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 15:24:46 +0000

[...] ← Previous [...]

Comment on Beautiful code from the C++ perspective by Lane

Lane — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:21:21 +0000

I think following the norms of the language is the first step in getting your code to look beautiful. After that, the default code formatters in IDEs are a pretty good choice on making the code look good (not beautiful, but good).

Comment on Beautiful code from the C++ perspective by Seth Holloway

Seth Holloway — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 03:44:17 +0000

I think beautiful code is consistent and clean. It’s clear and concise without being overly clever. Or perhaps just code I wrote Joking aside, I generally like to follow the norms [1] of the language I’m using.

I like airy yet tight code–three blank lines between methods is too much, but you need at least one. I like spaces after conditionals, like if (x… instead of if(x… I like spaces after opening parens and before closing parens, like void foo( bar ). I like around 120 character widths.

See [2] for a nice talk about less-than-beautiful code.

[1] http://learncodethehardway.org/blog/AUG_19_2012.html
[2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Ugly-Code

Comment on The right solution versus the correct solution by LaneHolloway.com - Principles of Good Design as Applied to Software Engineering

LaneHolloway.com - Principles of Good Design as Applied to Software Engineering — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 16:36:36 +0000

[...] I stayed away from a lot of questions that can come up. I know I didn’t touch on the idea of the right solution versus the correct solution which I’ve talked about a little before. Also, I didn’t talk about what happens if [...]

Comment on Is Java growing in the right direction? by Lane

Lane — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:55:45 +0000

Java’s strength (and the same can be said with C#) isn’t so much the language now but the JVM (or CLI in C#’s case) that is the true innovation. The ability to let other languages interoperate easily with other languages allows a best tool for the job approach.

I think Oracle bungled just about every dealing with Java for a while but they now seem to be getting to the point where they understand the ecosystem and realize the typical heavy hand of Oracle doesn’t work.

Comment on Is Java growing in the right direction? by Seth Holloway

Seth Holloway — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 05:07:20 +0000

I think Java is a big and getting bigger. Higher level is definitely the way to go, but I’m not convinced Java is improving the abstractions we can write.

At what point do we abandon a language and move on? If you have to convince your company to move to Java 1.8, why not convince them to move to a newer language that better fits your technical needs? That’s what choosing the right tool for the job should be about.

Some things that could hurt Java: Oracle, as well as companies like Google’s interest in other languages (in Google’s case, Go), and the rise of polyglot platforms like GitHub and Twitter who refuse to let any one language dominate.

I could see the JVM living on with Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. I could also see Java living on with an equivalent of CoffeeScript (a Ruby-like language that ends up as best-practice-ish JavaScript); developers could write in a language that feels better, but still have all the power of Java.

Comment on How Important is Writing Down Your Goals? by Lane

Lane — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 01:13:12 +0000

I dug a little deeper and found out that that statistic came from the Jeff Bullas website who said that the claim came from the book “What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School.” Which, is all well and good, until you notice that the book was published in 1986 and his website says the study started in 1979 and ended in 1989 with a reinterview of all the original participants. So something is fishy either in Amazon.com’s links / editions or his website. Which led me to another website, which debunks the study: http://sidsavara.com/personal-productivity/fact-or-fiction-the-truth-about-the-harvard-written-goal-study