Noel Rappin Writes Here

Previously On Locally Sourced: The Entropy Essays are a series of essays about how programming practices inspired by Extreme Programming such as testing, pair programing, and object-oriented design play out on modern web projects. The first one was about test speed. And eventually we’ll get to why they are called Entropy Essays. I want you to stop for a second and think: “why are you writing this test?” Not “why are you writing tests in general?

Yes, I really do need 700 LEGO bricks in order to flip that light switch… Program note: This essay is timed to the release of the draft-complete beta of Modern Front-End Programming with Rails. They won’t all be about the book, promise. (There will be one or two more about the book). There will be more Entropy Essays in the future about testing, object-oriented design, pairing, and so on… Something interesting happened as I was finishing up the book.

Speed matters. But not precisely. There are only two things that matter when thinking about the speed of your automated tests: How fast can you run the relevant set of tests to let the tests be helpful in development? How fast can you run a complete, green build for deploy? We’re talking about the first one in this essay. In development, you want to be able to run the tests you are writing and a subset of tests that are most likely to break based on your changes.

About, oh, eight or nine years ago, I decided I needed a personal website. On the theory that I didn’t want to become a full-time personal website wrangler, I decided to put the site on Squarespace. Squarespace was a great service, and a very well thought out set of tools but over time, it’s become less well suited for my (admittedly minimal) needs: Squarespace costs some money. When I started this site, it was at least theoretically a portal to self-published books.

Books That Made Me Happy 2019 Here’s big old book list for 2019. I did something very weird and nerdy this year. Rather than group the books by type, I just rank them. (I actually kind of rank them every year, but I don’t normally use the ranking in this post because I don’t want it to seem like a competition). To be extra nerdy, what I did this year was write a short program that randomly picked two books and asked me to compare them, and repeated that over and over, then did various math things to convert all those comparisons into a score and then a ranking.

Books that made me happy 2018 Well, I failed in my plan to get this out by the end of January, but here are the books I liked in 2018. Unlike past years, here they all are in one post, I think it’s about 25. I tried, with mixed success to not write six gazillion words about each book. Enjoy! My favorite book of the year The Calculating Stars / The Fated Sky by Mary Robinette Kowal— if you have ever liked anything I’ve recommended ever, there’s a good chance you’ll like this.

20 some-odd years ago, when I was a graduate student, I spent about two years building Mac applications using a language called Prograph. You’ve likely never heard of it. I want to explain why I’m still kind of obsessed with it. I’ve spent a lot of the intervening 20 years explaining to people why it was great. I’ve I’ve been capable of delivering this as a lightning talk at the drop of a hat at any time in the past ten years.

These are a director’s notes on my talk “The Developer’s Toolkit”, you can also watch the video here. It has sources for all the tools mentioned in the talk, and a little commentary that didn’t quite fit in. Hope this is helpful: General References Small, Sharp, Software Tools by Brian Hogan is still in beta but looks to be a good reference to Unix command line things. Which still can be useful, even if I don’t think they are the be-all and end-all.

Truinboy: https://flic.kr/p/5pkYiv Everybody in the Ruby community says they love pair programming. We often use it as a proxy for the awesomeness of a developer shop. Developer candidates regularly ask me if we pair as part of their attempt to determine if we know what we are doing. I wish we’d cut that out. Pairing is not a proxy for how good a development shop is. Pairing is also not, in my experience, a great tool for increasing team productivity and code quality.

2017 Books A Plenty At long last, the 2017 books that made me happy/recommendations post. Did you miss me? Past years: 2016 Part 1 Part Two 2015 Part 1 Part Two 2014 SF Fantasy This year, I’m doing it all in one post, because if you are going to write 4000 words it’s best to get it all in at once, that’s just science. The rules are: These are all books I read in 2017 That I liked The books are organized into arbitrary groups, because there were weird coincidences, in that I read a number of say, unusual time-travel books this year.