Thursday, June 8, 2017
Technology Reads
Read From blog : http://memeagora.blogspot.nl/
Writing good multi-threading code is hard. Very hard. So why bother? Why not use a language that handles multiple threads more gracefully? Like a functional language? Functional languages eliminate side effects on variables, making it easier to write thread-safe code. Haskell is such a language, and implementations exist for both Java (Jaskell) and .NET (Haskell.net). Need a nice web-based user interface? Why not use Ruby on Rails via JRuby (which now support RoR).
It's all about choosing the right tool for the job and leveraging it correctly. Increasingly,we're going to start adding domain specific languages. The times of writing an application in a single general purpose language is over.
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One of the difficulties in distributed agile development is keeping the communication link strong between the geographically (and time zone) separated teams.
we attempted to type in really comprehensive summaries of each day's development work. However, we eventually realized that we were duplicating effort: we already put detailed comments for our check-ins to Subversion. So, we had one of our temporary resources cook up the following little developer shim.
He created a tool called SVN2WIKI. It uses the SVN post-commit hook to harvest the comment of the code just checked in. It then posts those comments to the Wiki, creating a dated page if one doesn't exist or adding to the page already there if it does. The Wiki were using (Instiki) offers an RSS feed for all changed pages. So, we installed an RSS Reader (RssBandit) on the developer workstations. Now, when a developer sits down, he or she can get an up-to-the-minute summary of all the stuff that has happened to the code base since the last time he or she looked. Because it's an RSS reader, it keeps track of what you've already read. This is a great way to keep up to date at a really detailed level for what is happening to the code base.
his hasn't eliminated the need to create daily summary pages, but these can be much more terse, and focus on outstanding questions across the ocean. The Wiki contains a living history of the project, told one check-in at a time. For those who say that agile projects don't keep documentation, the Wiki on our project is a living, breathing history of the project at a really detailed level.
Our SVN2WIKI tool is a good example of piecing together a bunch of old and common technologies (SVN, Instiki, RSS) to create a great time saver for developers while improving the toughest part of our project.
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OLE was born (Object Linking and Embedding). This allowed 2 things: embed an application inside another one, so that the user could interact with the spreadsheet embedded in a Word document. This, by the way, is why Office document formats are so obtuse. Each of the Office documents must act as a container for any other OLE object that might be embedded. The other feature of OLE was the ability for one application to drive another through background commands. This aspect of OLE was split off and became COM (and, its distributed cousin, DCOM).
That wasn't sufficient for a variety of reasons, so we got COM+. Then .NET Remoting. Which leads us back around to Monad (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now that it's official - Windows Power Shell). Monad is a way for...wait for it...a command line script (or batch file) to make two application interact with one another, through COM+ interfaces. The idea is that you can pump some rows from an Excel spreadsheet into Outlook as email addresses and tell Outlook to send some files to the recipients.
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I tried a new trick this year at ThoughtWorks Away Day: pair teaching. He and I used 2 computers, 2 projectors, and one topic (Ruby for ThoughtWorkers Who Dont Know Ruby But Want to Know Why It Rocks: Learning Ruby Through Unit Testing). In the end, the sum was greater than the parts. It was a frantic 1 hour presentation, with something happening constantly. After the smoke cleared, another ThoughtWorker said that he really enjoyed it because his mind only wandered for about 4 minutes total during the entire time, and suggested that if we hire a clown to walk through the audience, juggling, and repeating our key points, that we would have held 100% of his attention. High praise, indeed.
Writing good multi-threading code is hard. Very hard. So why bother? Why not use a language that handles multiple threads more gracefully? Like a functional language? Functional languages eliminate side effects on variables, making it easier to write thread-safe code. Haskell is such a language, and implementations exist for both Java (Jaskell) and .NET (Haskell.net). Need a nice web-based user interface? Why not use Ruby on Rails via JRuby (which now support RoR).
It's all about choosing the right tool for the job and leveraging it correctly. Increasingly,we're going to start adding domain specific languages. The times of writing an application in a single general purpose language is over.
-----------------------------------------XXXXXXXXXX------------------------------
One of the difficulties in distributed agile development is keeping the communication link strong between the geographically (and time zone) separated teams.
we attempted to type in really comprehensive summaries of each day's development work. However, we eventually realized that we were duplicating effort: we already put detailed comments for our check-ins to Subversion. So, we had one of our temporary resources cook up the following little developer shim.
He created a tool called SVN2WIKI. It uses the SVN post-commit hook to harvest the comment of the code just checked in. It then posts those comments to the Wiki, creating a dated page if one doesn't exist or adding to the page already there if it does. The Wiki were using (Instiki) offers an RSS feed for all changed pages. So, we installed an RSS Reader (RssBandit) on the developer workstations. Now, when a developer sits down, he or she can get an up-to-the-minute summary of all the stuff that has happened to the code base since the last time he or she looked. Because it's an RSS reader, it keeps track of what you've already read. This is a great way to keep up to date at a really detailed level for what is happening to the code base.
his hasn't eliminated the need to create daily summary pages, but these can be much more terse, and focus on outstanding questions across the ocean. The Wiki contains a living history of the project, told one check-in at a time. For those who say that agile projects don't keep documentation, the Wiki on our project is a living, breathing history of the project at a really detailed level.
Our SVN2WIKI tool is a good example of piecing together a bunch of old and common technologies (SVN, Instiki, RSS) to create a great time saver for developers while improving the toughest part of our project.
------------------------------------XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX--------------
OLE was born (Object Linking and Embedding). This allowed 2 things: embed an application inside another one, so that the user could interact with the spreadsheet embedded in a Word document. This, by the way, is why Office document formats are so obtuse. Each of the Office documents must act as a container for any other OLE object that might be embedded. The other feature of OLE was the ability for one application to drive another through background commands. This aspect of OLE was split off and became COM (and, its distributed cousin, DCOM).
That wasn't sufficient for a variety of reasons, so we got COM+. Then .NET Remoting. Which leads us back around to Monad (or whatever Microsoft is calling it now that it's official - Windows Power Shell). Monad is a way for...wait for it...a command line script (or batch file) to make two application interact with one another, through COM+ interfaces. The idea is that you can pump some rows from an Excel spreadsheet into Outlook as email addresses and tell Outlook to send some files to the recipients.
------------------------------------------------XXXXXXXXXXXX-----------------------------------
I tried a new trick this year at ThoughtWorks Away Day: pair teaching. He and I used 2 computers, 2 projectors, and one topic (Ruby for ThoughtWorkers Who Dont Know Ruby But Want to Know Why It Rocks: Learning Ruby Through Unit Testing). In the end, the sum was greater than the parts. It was a frantic 1 hour presentation, with something happening constantly. After the smoke cleared, another ThoughtWorker said that he really enjoyed it because his mind only wandered for about 4 minutes total during the entire time, and suggested that if we hire a clown to walk through the audience, juggling, and repeating our key points, that we would have held 100% of his attention. High praise, indeed.
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