Terse Systems

I’m commuting down to LA for my current gig. That gives me about two hours free before the plane flight where I have pretty much nothing to do. So I work on my blog and read.

I’ve given up on blocking the comment spam in the current version of the blog. It’s going to make more sense to do it in the next release. So (following the test-first methodology) instead of actually writing code to create and delete comments in Hibernate, I’m researching dbunit and trying to figure out the best ways to strip and reinstate a database in different apps. I can’t decide whether this is wise or not.

I’ve been researching programming methodologies again (here’s last time – even if you don’t read it, read The Inevitable Pain of Software Development, which is by far the best paper I found). The hard bit is getting empirical data which says what methods were successful under which circumstances. However, I did find a review of agile programming methods that gave me some very useful data points. The interesting thing is that it’s all been done before.

I also found the programming podcasts on itconversations. These are mysteriously addictive – I can play them sitting in the airport or waiting for a bus and feel like I’m doing something useful. I have to admit I don’t like the not-so-subliminal ads that the speakers put in for their books, products, and seminars, but you can learn more context in an interview than you can in a book because the interviewer actually understands software development.

Now I want to read Agile Software Development. But how useful is that in practice? How useful is any of this in practice? I don’t know. And getting a good quality filter in place is almost as expensive as ignorance.