From Straights Times:

A flier aboard Sunday’s Swiss airline flight – a 57-year-old Chinese man […] felt disturbed during his meal when the passenger in front of him reclined his chair.[…]

“The older of the two felt disturbed during his dinner. When the younger did not respond to his protests, he hit him on the head with the flat of his hand. It was a real slap,” said the guide, Ms Valerie Sprenger.

Of all the data types, double is probably one of the most misunderstood. A huge amount of folk lore has been built up around it to help protect developers from falling into its many pitfalls.  Lately I’ve done a lot of work replacing usage of BigDecimal with double and learnt a lot about where those pitfalls are and how the folk lore can be misleading.

The great challenge with double is that it has a degree of inaccuracy because of the way the number is actually stored.  For example, the number 2983792734924.2293 actually winds up being stored as 2983792734924.2295, a tiny difference but with far reaching consequences. All of the folk lore around doubles is designed to deal with this potential for inaccuracy.

Farnam Street Blog holds up a coding competition as evidence that:

If you want to make your computer programmers and engineers more effective give them “privacy, personal space, control over their physical environments, and freedom from interruption.”

The only trouble is, the coding competition is fatally flawed as a measure of normal developer productivity. It’s setup such that developers work on their own:

Each participant was also assigned a partner from the same company. The partners worked separately, however, without any communication, a feature of the games that turned out to be critical.

Sarah Goff-Dupont has a post on the Atlassian blog about how Atlassian is using feature branches and still doing continuous integration:

In the not-so-recent past, continuous integration in the context of story branching was considered so impractical as to be outright incompatible.  Who has time to manually configure a CI scheme for dozens of active branches that will only live a couple of days?  Nobody –that’s who.  And story branch-loving teams would frequently encounter *ahem* “surprises” when merging work onto the main code line –”master”, in Git-speak.  But recent versions of Bamboo have essentially removed that overhead and allowed these two frenenmies to become genuinely harmonious partners in our development lifecycle.

There’s a huge amount of complaining and problem solving for various dependency management solutions (particularly maven, but ivy and friends certainly aren’t immune). Problems range from having optional dependencies unnecessarily included  to having duplicate classes or class conflicts and the solutions tend to be complex and involve a lot of trade offs. All these problems stem from breaking the golden rule of dependency management:

Own your own repository

— Sutton's golden rule of dependency management

Having configuration differences between development and production is largely unavoidable, but it’s important to keep the number of differences to a minimum to avoid unexpected bugs appearing in production that don’t occur in development mode. More than that though, it’s important to minimise configuration.

Configuration is Code

Often things are put in configuration files so that they are easy to change later, often without a full redeployment of the software, but that also implies it can be changed without going through the full testing that a release would usually be subject to. It’s rare for automated tests to cover more than one possible setting for these configuration options so changing them in production is equivalent to deploying completely untested code. What’s worse, it’s quick and easy to do with no audit trail of what happened and when.

Most systems have multiple configuration profiles – one for production, one for development and often other profiles for staging, testing etc.  Minimising differences between these configurations is critical but there are inevitably some things that just have to be different. This then leaves the question, what should the default settings be?

There are three main options:

• Default to production values
• Default to development values
• Refuse to start unless an environment has been explicitly chosen

My preference is to default to development values. Why?

There is a lot of discussion at the moment about the Oracle v Google trial today, mostly centring around how impossible it is for the jury to understand the very technical concepts involved in the case.  As Daring Fireball puts it:

How could a randomly-selected jury possibly decide this? No knock intended against the jurors themselves — and it sounds like they’re doing their best to make an informed decision. But there’s a difference between a jury of your citizen peers and a jury of your technical peers.

I thus think (= hope) that it’s a mistake to extrapolate from today’s crappy input systems on tablets to a future of tablet-based couch potatoes still watching Hollywood crap. We’re one innovation away from lowering the creativity hurdle on tablets. Maybe it’ll be a truly responsive keyboard. Or something that translates sub-vocalizations into text (because I’m too embarrassed to dictate into my table while in public places). Or, well, something. via Joho the Blog » Will tablets always make us non-social consumers?. I suspect that the idea that input systems on tablets are crappy will rapidly become a tell-tale sign of age. Feature phones have “crappy” input systems and yet with learning, and some rather unfortunate adaptations of language, people quite happily chat away via SMS. The same process will happen with tablets – people will simply learn to type on on-screen keyboards fast enough that they don’t consider them crappy. It’s also important to remember that the vast majority of people can’t type particularly fast on a full size desktop keyboard so the bar for satisfaction is significantly lower than geeks would expect.

Since the very early days of my blogging, I’ve integrated a copy of EditLive! to make the editing pleasant and more powerful. For many, many years there was simply no way I could bring myself to use anything else. Lately though, Apple have been making Java applets less and less appealing while browsers have been continuously improving their content editable suport and JavaScript editors have gotten better at working around the remaining quirks and smoothing off the rough edges on the editing experience.  The final straw for me though was that the current early access release of EditLive! 8.0, which appears to include a lot of fixes for the latest OS X, breaks backwards compatibility with a number of APIs I use to integrate it into this blog.

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. With the same people attempting to do both jobs that contention is unavoidable.

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. You can’t just rollback the faulty change, its going to take time to get the build back to green. As your CI system grows, it may take time just to understand what went wrong. If your team is small they may all be taken up fixing the problem, but if the team is larger a pair focusses on fixing the build as quickly as possible and the other developers carry on working. Now you have two problems.