Voice of Truth

Paul Graham's latest post about the differences in schedules for makers and managers is a must read for anyone managing software developers, and possibly more important if you're married to one. It struck a chord with me since I was having a highly productive week at work with no scheduled meetings until yesterday afternoon. http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html As a developer that worked in management for a few years, its difficult to remember the importance of this concept once you've made the transition. It begins to seem like anyone can afford an hour here or there for a meeting.

This doesn't make for the most entertaining reading, but I've decided to use this blog as my long-term memory for reference material. Currently, I'm getting started on my first python Turbogears 2.0 application, and I need to setup apache with mod_wsgi. These are the references I've accumulated. A good follow-up article would discuss issues I ran into. We'll see how motivated I am. Perplexed labs instructions for setup to support django (Wow, this step was much harder than it should have been. I have a better understanding of our apache infrastructure now though.) Turbogears documentation on apache deployment mod_wsgi quick install guide mod_wsgi integration with pylons (Turbogears controller framework) mod_wsgi using virtualenv Turbogears tutorial on mod_wsgi+virtualenv+modwsgideploy

This post from Jeff Atwood last week is a humorous example of how quickly web advertising can deteriorate to appeal to the lowest-common denominator. http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001286.html It would be great if services like Yahoo! Mail would allow me to select the advertisers I'll allow, or specifically block some. Of course, I don't want to pay for this feature.

I've been meaning to read up on DSL implementation approaches, possibly for use in a thesis project. This is my initial list of references to review. Martin Fowler's online book (work-in-progress) Software Language Engineering: Creating Domain-Specific Languages Using Metamodels by Anneke Kleppe , pub 12/8/09 (available in Safari Books Online) Eclipse Modeling Project: A Domain-Specific Language (DSL) Toolkit by Richard C. Gronback, pub 3/6/09 (available in Safari Books Online, looks Java heavy) Domain-Specific Development with Visual Studio DSL Tools by Steve Cook; Gareth Jones; Stuart Kent; Alan Cameron Wills , pub 5/24/07 (Safari books online)

It looks like Mr. Sutherland's article on functional testing vs. unit testing has been around for a while, but I just came across it via Hacker News. Benefits of automated functional testing My experience with unit tests has been largely ad-hoc, for example when I'm working with a bug-prone chunk of code. I've never been part of a large system with solid unit test coverage or worked in a TDD environment. That being said, I agree with the general premise of Tim's message. As the release manager (by default) on a fairly complex java system, having a number of solid automated functional tests was very valuable to prevent a lot of wasted testing time during busy release weekends. The ROI of creating and maintaining a large set of unit tests seems to be much less.