May 16, 2012

Growing a Team By Investing in Tools

It’s widely recognised that adding people to a team often doesn’t result in increases in velocity and can even reduce the velocity of the team due to the extra communication overhead. Instead, teams look to increasing levels of automation and tools to improve their productivity without adding extra people. Where many teams struggle however is in finding the right balance of building out the product versus “sharpening the saw” by improving their tools and automating processes.

May 2, 2012

Go Faster By Not Working

We all know by now that continuous integration is part of good software development – check in regularly and have a suite of automated tests run to confirm that everything is working as expected. If a test fails, jump on it quickly and get the build back to green. Simple right? But what happens when something goes wrong in a way that can’t be fixed quickly? For example, the build server has a hardware fault or runs out of disk space.

March 27, 2012

Ignoring Changes to Tracked Files in Git

I’m going to want to remember this one day, so here’s a pointer to Rob Wilderson’s Ignore Changes to Tracked Files in Git. I’m especially going to want to remember the bit about how to find which files I’ve ignored in this way.

March 19, 2012

Resolving SVN Tree Conflicts

SVN tree conflicts can be insanely annoying – especially when they occur because you’ve deleted something locally and then an incoming change also deletes it. They can also be hard to resolve from most IDEs. The trick is to resolve them from the command line. Edit/create/delete the files to get things into the state they should be and then from the command line run: svn resolve --accept working <path> No more tree conflict.

March 2, 2012

Alternating Table Row Colours Filling All Available Space

CSS3 makes it trivial to have alternating row colours for tables, but when the table is in a fixed height scroll panel, it’s much more difficult to have those alternating row colours extend beyond the bottom of the table content to fill the available space. Here’s the approach I use. First let’s start with a simple table with alternating colours in a scroll panel: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset=UTF-8> <title>Alternating Rows Example</title> <style> * { margin: 0; padding: 0; } table { border-collapse: collapse; width: 100%; height: 100%; } .

February 28, 2012

How To Round-Trip Data Via SSH

I keep forgetting this so for the record, you can use SSH to round trip data out to a remote server and back to your own box. This is most useful for adding latency and bandwidth limitations to a connection when doing website testing. The trick is to use both local and remote port forwards: ssh -L 9090:localhost:9091 -R 9091:localhost:80 remote.server.com The -L argument starts listening on port 9090 locally and sends all that traffic to port 9091 on the remote server (the domain name, localhost, is resolved by the remote server so it refers to the remote server, not your local machine).

January 25, 2012

The Business of Standards

Recently I’ve been getting spam from the “standards organisation” OASIS inviting a company that I don’t work for1{#footlink1:1327526703777.footnote} to join a new standards initiative. There’s no pretense that I’m being invited because of my clearly superior knowledge of the area involved, merely that the company could get great advertising exposure by participating – including being listed on a press release! Naturally we’d need to become OASIS members and pay the appropriate fee, and to be in the press release you’d have to be at minimum a “sponsor level member”.

January 11, 2012

Development Mode – Concatenating Scripts and CSS

HTML 5 Boilerplate reminded me of an old-school tool which is extremely useful for concatenating JS and CSS files on the fly – server side includes: <FilesMatch ".*\.combined\.(js|css)$"> Options +Includes SetOutputFilter INCLUDES </FilesMatch> Then you have a main scripts.combined.js (or css) which contains:    Plus any other files you need, in the order you specify. This works great for development mode so you can change a file on the fly and just refresh the browser without running any kind of build script.

January 3, 2012

Cross Pairing

This evening I stumbled across two interesting posts about alternate layouts for pairing rather than sitting side by side. Firstly Tom Dale talking about Tilde’s corner desk pairing setup (and some of the software setup they use) and that was inspired by Josh Susser’s face to face pairing setup at Pivotal Labs. Both approaches require more floor space which makes them difficult to setup but I would expect the face to face pairing to be a heck of a lot better if done well.

January 2, 2012

Bottlenecks in Programmer Productivity

Yan Pritzker recently posted “5 ways to get insane productivity boosts for coders” which provides some good tips on how to improve your usage of tools when doing technical work. To summarise: Never look when you can search Don’t repeat yourself (by setting up shortcuts and command line aliases) Learn a scripting language Learn an editor (and use that editor everywhere) Learn regular expressions However, nearly all of these tips really boil down to how to be more productive at writing text and the mechanics of writing code – editing actual source code files, jumping to different places in those files, executing commands more efficiently etc.

January 1, 2012

Searching on Google Maps Does Nothing In Chrome

If you’re experiencing an issue when using Chrome with Google Maps where typing in a location and hitting enter either does nothing or just says “Loading…” forever, you’ve very likely hit upon a bug in the Skype click-to-call extension. Skype automatically installs this “add-on” when you install Skype and it adds links to phone numbers so that you can click them to call on Skype. Unfortunately, Google Maps seems to be triggering a bug in the extension and so it is either corrupting the data returned to the Google Maps javascript or just preventing the request from ever returning.

December 11, 2011

More Career Advice

Following on from my last post, Jason Adam Young has some excellent advice to help you continually get better and better and building software and perhaps more importantly, be more and more valuable to whoever you happen to be working for.