Posts

A Beginners Guide I use RubyMine without doing any rails and doing just what you ask. I write a lot of simple scripts, and large applications, both often usable from a command line. I still organize my code into a ‘project directory’. And point RM at that directory. Instead of just working entirely in a file, and trying to point RM at the file alone. This seems to be what IDE’s prefer. This lets RM create its .idea directory to hold all of its project related settings. ...

How I choose to work has changed over the years, naturally. Learning new technologies and techniques. New hammers and tools to put on my belt. An important part of this was how I went about choosing what technologies to associate myself with. I didn’t just let people set things down in front of me, and choose my paths for me. I constantly researched and pro-actively vetted technological choices. Its been a constant daily regimine. ...

I’m trying to promote code sharing and code review and open source ideas, internally at my company. I setup a copy of gitorious on our intranet and we’re starting to commit projects into it. I whipped up a quick overview of Git and Gitorious to share with my coworkers to make them more comfortable with the systems and get them started. Its not entirely technically accurate but it reflects how I view the systems. ...

I’d been doing this for a years, but had no idea there was a name for it. For me it came out of unit testing UIs. I found my widget classes would have a lot of dependenciees. But they’d only end up using each dependency for a one or two small things each. It seems a shame to pass in the whole object just for that. Also this left me with alot to mock in my unit tests. ...

In my applications I persist a lot of structured data into the database. Hibernate and other ORMs are great at making this easy to do. One problem is that they tend to map the entire object structure to rigidly structured database fields and tables. Quite often that’s just overkill. Strings as a black box datatype Take strings for instance. A VARCHAR makes perfect sense if you know the string will always be less than, say, 30 characters. Even if your not going to use that string field in a where clause, ever. ...

I know that programmers.stackexchange is supposed to be the cruft of stackoverflow… the spam folder, if you will. But its turning out to be my favorite programming related site.

Sometimes you don’t want to load the data for a view, but not until the view is actually being seen by the user. Such as when they click on the tab to expose it. This is taken care of automatically in Web UI’s because the user simply won’t be on the right page yet. Not until they’ve clicked on the right link or button to take them to the page with that view. But I do this a lot in the front-end tier of multi-tier applications (i.e. the desktop UI for a remote backend or database ). Desktop applications tend to have all the views and their code constructed at startup. Waiting for the component to be visible can be a little tricky in Swing. Various events and states can be mis-leading. Other components can think they’re visible but actually be obscured. You also don’t want to poll for isShowing(). Here is a skeleton that works well for me. ...