Category Archives: Uncategorized

An Executor is someone who deals with people’s lives after they’re dead. An Executioner is someone who renders people dead. Strangely, they both execute. What a pity this code doesn’t.

Last night I went to the XtC, where I met a bunch of very interesting people and discussed best coding practices and haiku. We decided that while it would be lovely to see comments in haiku-esque form throughout code, to … Continue reading →

Finally, I will be joining the likes of Martin Fowler et al as a paid, published writer. Two of my poems have been selected for Star*Line, the Science Fiction Poetry Association magazine, and will hopefully be appearing in print later … Continue reading →

I’ve started going through my Hellbound project and replacing some of the mocks I’ve been using in JBehave with real code. This means, of course, that the functional tests which relied on the mocks for verification don’t do anything any … Continue reading →

My current pair Dan and I got into a discussion about blame cultures. He told me about a meeting he was once in, in which the boss said, “We don’t want to start a blame culture.” “Yes,” said another employee, … Continue reading →

When I started here, I was secretly concerned. How could I ever hope to match my new colleagues’ motivation, let alone their technical skill? How could I find the time to mess with projects outside of work, and the passion … Continue reading →

Oh, Lotus Notes. I was rude to you In December. You ate my email. Isn’t that revenge enough For those words? Don’t hang like that. Don’t leave me with no choice but To kill you. I pity you. You’ve never … Continue reading →

Behaviour-driven-design advocate Manish and I have just had a chat over IM. He’s pointed out to me that checking things after the event is just testing, whereas anticipating things before the event is design. Design is good. Bugfixing is a … Continue reading →

I’m increasingly coming to believe that there’s no such thing as a bad idea. They tend to generate good ideas, or cause changes which help to generate better ideas in future. The only danger is that occasionally, bad ideas get … Continue reading →

JBehave’s Story Runner runs through scenarios as follows: Given a context When an event happens Then this outcome occurs. So you’d think it would visit these in the order “context, event, outcome”. Unfortunately, the mocks all have to be set … Continue reading →