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Will we ever learn?

I met a friend yesterday for lunch that works for one of my former employers. I left this place five years ago because my division of IT had devolved into complete madness. I've written about the organization several times, most recently in my Reversibility post with this little nugget about our...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 02-29-2008
Superman without the yellow sun

This is just a post to gripe and commiserate with each other. Everybody knows that Superman is nearly crippled by the presence of Kryptonite. What we might forget is that Superman's powers are derived from exposure to the yellow sun of Earth. Why is this relevant? Simple. When I'm using VS2008...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 01-15-2008
Just because it's in a patterns book...

I'm picking on a commenter here a little bit , and he probably didn't mean it this way, but it provided the impetus. Don't ever assume a solution is correct for your problem just because it's a pattern in a book on your shelf. Heck, the GoF book has a full chapter on the Singleton pattern...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 10-15-2007
Wrestling with pure evil

1.) Very long method + 2.) Non descriptive variable names + 3.) Variables are reused for different things throughout the method + 4.) Lots of if/then exception cases + 5.) Deeply nested Arrowhead code + 6.) All data stored in Hashtable's -- and it's this data that's getting bamboozled somewhere...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 09-21-2007
I've heard this story before

"It started as a prototype, but got pushed into production" All of the very worst systems I've worked with have an origination story that can be summed up by the 10 words above. If you hear these words, either run or go into legacy code mode. Prototypes are dangerous. Dangerous in that...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 08-27-2007
Don't ever, ever build domain objects that can't...

...run without the database -- Active Record implementations like Trade trade = new Trade("tradeId") where the constructor immediately reaches into the database to grab the rest of its properties. One of the reasons that I won't use the Entity Framework by choice is the lazy fetch implementation...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 08-27-2007
Not checking code in should make you feel unclean

The title says it all. You should almost break out in hives if you keep modified code out of source control for very long. It's like putting milk out on the kitchen counter. A little while is fine, but too long leads to gross sour milk. Check in often. Please?

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 05-02-2007
Don't know about "CodeBetter," but I'm with Ayende

Right off the bat, the "CodeBetter" guys did not give any sort of collective "seal of approval" to the Linq to Entities Framework -- and why the hell would it matter even if we did? I found the Entities Framework to be intriguing for its potential and underlying technical foundation...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 04-10-2007
Being afraid of your backhand

I haven't played Tennis in several years, but when I did I had a truly awful backhand. I would routinely kill myself trying to run across the court to position myself to hit a forehand. I'm bringing up my Tennis defficiencies as an analogy for development. I'm seeing too many cases where...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 02-21-2007
My Least Favorite Form of Requirements

Just make it work like [system XYZ] does. Ok, and exactly what does [system XYZ] do? Is that really what the client wants? You know it's a little difficult to reproduce in 5 months what originally took 10-12 years don't you? Maybe we could prioritize which features really do get ported? Two years...

Posted to Jeremy D. Miller -- The Shade Tree Developer (Weblog) by Jeremy D. Miller on 02-20-2007