Category Archives: Uncategorized

Occasionally, getting together with my colleagues from across the world, I’m suddenly reminded of how small the Earth is, and how many gulfs and divisions there are on this little planet. Countries represented at our UK Away Day on Saturday … Continue reading →

Ade is collecting stories about apprenticeships on behalf of Dave Hoover. He asked me to write mine down. So here it is. My educational background is in Electronic and Electrical Engineering, not IT, though I’ve always loved computers. I learnt … Continue reading →

Last night at the XtC, Rachel Davies and Tim Bacon did a dry run of their “Informative Workspace” workshop, to be held at XP2005. Rachel said that she’d taken the term “Informative Workspace” from one of the new practices in … Continue reading →

Darren and I had a chat about my article on arrogance. He said he didn’t like my “anti-pragmatic” stance. I was confused. “But… I wasn’t anti-pragmatic. Was I? I said that idealists need to listen more to pragmatists. I parodied … Continue reading →

A discussion on the Yahoo XP group regarding refactoring long methods into smaller ones coincided with me writing the code below. This is from my most recent test class, which is 180+ lines and growing: public void testThatRefundingTwoToysBoughtOnDifferentDaysDoesNotCauseError() throws Exception … Continue reading →

I spoke to some of my colleagues back in London and was reliably informed (again) that the ratio of idealists to pragmatists amongst them is in fact lower than I made out in my last post. We did agree, though, … Continue reading →

arrogant adj. Having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance. Marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one’s superiority toward others: an arrogant contempt for the weak. Thank you, dictionary.com. “Do you know,” said Roy, … Continue reading →

I’ve not touched Ruby yet, but I’m insatiably curious, so I talked to Darren about it. As far as I can work out, dynamic languages in general are fantastic if you’re running Test Driven Design; because it’s not the compiler … Continue reading →

Last week, Alan pointed me towards Dale Emery’s post on <a href="http://www.dhemery.com/cwd/2003/06/the_value_question.html”>the value question. Reading it made me think a lot about several things which I’m trying to accomplish; today, tomorrow, and with my life in general. It’s been an … Continue reading →

All problems, from wars to software bugs, are caused by a combination of the following: lack of communication lack of courage lack of imagination lack of time. It’s arguable that the first three are products of the last.