04.30.07

CITCON North America ‘07

Posted in Software Development, Thoughtworks at 2:55 pm by BestFriendChris

This last weekend I attended CITCON in Dallas. Awesome. I had some amazing conversations, watched Bret Pettichord blow me away with customizing RSpec, actually met Elisabeth Hendrickson (and received a sweet green wristband that says, “test obsessed”), joined in a great conversation about what we are looking for in a testing language, and was surprised to discover there are people out there that actually like ant (to be fair, though, he does work on AnthillPro). The only downside was there were 2 topics at the same time that I wanted to go to, so I attended a talk on code metrics and missed out on the CI server cage match (There were like 6 different CI Servers represented at the conference, and they all got in a room to compare features and benefits of each).

If you’ve never been to a conference in an OpenSpace format, you’re really missing out. The short (-ish) version is that there are no preassigned speakers for the conference. On Friday, we all sat in a circle and people could write ideas down on a 3×5 card stating what they want to talk about. It might be some tool you want to show off, some concept you want to tell people, or, just as likely, something you know nothing about and what to learn. The only requirement is if you suggest the topic, you have to facilitate it and help get the conversation going.

After we had about 30 topics, we set them up on a board showing the rooms and time slots. Then, we go to the next room to drink and chat. As the night moved on, people we encouraged to wander back over to the schedule and rearrange topics, vote on what they want to see, and combine topics together. If you see two topics at the same time you really want to see, you just swap one of the topics with a different one so you can see them both. While you would think this would cause all sorts of problems, it turns out that, in general, people aren’t jerks, so you don’t get a constantly shifting schedule as much as a gradually improving one. A key element of OpenSpaces is the rule of 2 feet. If you don’t feel you’re getting the most out of a session, it’s up to you to walk to a better session. If you suggest a topic and nobody shows up (Actually happened for one of them), feel free to move to a different one. This puts the onus on you to get something from the conference. There are plenty of smart people attending, so if you don’t learn anything, you must have been actively avoiding conversations.

One of the interesting things is that the conference is free and takes place from Friday night to all day Saturday. The effect of this is the people that attend are doing so from a very real desire to learn. They are spending their free time to improve their craft and learn from their peers. It really raises the bar of the attendees. It’s amazing how much a difference actually caring about what you do can make.

Well, I guess that’s about it. There are 2 more CITCONs this year: CITCON Asia/Pacific 2007 in Sydney, July 27 & 28, 2007 and CITCON Europe 2007 in Brussels, October 19 & 20, 2007. I’m pretty sure I’m going to go to the one in Brussels, (London 06 was just as awesome as this last one). If you’re in the area, I can safely recommend attending.

Final thoughts: When I first heard about CITCON, I focused on the “Continuous Integration” part of the name (which I didn’t have much passion around). I think it’s important, however, to understand that Testing, Agile, TDD and other xp-ish stuff are just as represented (if not more so). I’m glad I decided to go.

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04.23.07

ErUnit - Unit Testing for Erlang

Posted in ErUnit at 10:06 pm by BestFriendChris

So, I just wrote about my new favorite language Erlang. When learning a new language, it usually helps me to work on a simple problem I’ve solved before to understand how things work. So, I grabbed one of the coding exercises we use in recruiting at t-dub (no, I’m not going to post about them). Now, as every good xp-er, I started writing my test. Or, I should say, started looking for an xUnit framework for Erlang. Nada.

So, I wrote one myself. Test-first, I might add. (Trust me, it doesn’t get much more meta than that).

Download me. (or svn co http://codeby.bestfriendchris.com/svn/ErUnit/tags/erunit-0.1.0/)

To install, put it in the Erlang code path (on my OSX machine, it is /opt/local/lib/erlang/lib). Also, if you want to use the erlang script, add the bin folder to your PATH.

To write tests, you just need to name your test file test_whatever_you_want and add the following to the file:

-behaviour(erunit_test).
-export([tests/0]).

I’d show you some more example test code, but my code highlighter doesn’t support Erlang, and I don’t really have the time to hack a new language file together for it right now. So, I’ll link directly to the test case I used in writing ErUnit: test_erunit.erl

To run tests from the command line, type:

To run the test from erl, type:

A few more notes:

• If you use seperate folders ebin and src for your .beam and .erl files respectively, ErUnit has the convention of using ebin_test and test. Again, look at the way ErUnit itself is packaged to get the idea.
• erunit_suite will run all tests in every subfolder of the one it is run in.This allows you to have some sort of hierarchy to your code and tests.
• erunit_suite is pretty smart about loading test files. It will make sure that all of the folders the test.beam files are in are included in the code path and auto-magically handle the case where you are using seperate ebin and ebin_test folders. Subfolders within either ebin or ebin_test are not yet supported.
• You might notice that a bunch of the features of most other xUnit implementations are missing. This is, at least in some cases, on purpose (in others, it’s because we’re talking 0.1 version). I’m only adding features as I need them. For instance, I haven’t added Setup or Teardown methods, mostly because I’m not yet convinced that they will be required in a functional language. And even if they are needed, it’s pretty trivial to wrap your test functions in a setup/teardown pair of funs.
• No Documentation? Yeah. I’ve actually been sitting on ErUnit for at least a week because I wanted to write some good docs for it. Since that hasn’t happened yet, I figured I’d at least put this out there and maybe get around to it eventually.

Comments/Suggestions/Complaints?

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Erlang - Good fun (groan)

Posted in Erlang at 9:01 pm by BestFriendChris

So, the other day I was shopping around for a new language. Specifically, I was looking for a functional language that wouldn’t cause my brain to bleed (and not Scheme. Love it dearly, but I needed something new). Enter Erlang. I found out about this little guy from a new beta book from the prag guys called Programming Erlang, Software for a Concurrent World (totally recommend it).

Bullets:

• Functional
  No state == Hooray!

• Supports Hot Swapping of code
  I know I wouldn’t even think of swapping any other way than hot

• Designed to support distributed, fault-tolerant, soft-real-time, non-stop applications
  I actually know what that means! To be fair, I swiped that bullet off the wikipedia page

• Super Sweet Thread Communication Mechanism(tm)
  Threads are actually an extremely common part of Erlang development. In most languages, threads hurt kittens. In Erlang, they only hurt nasty dogs who probably deserved it.

I’d recommend checking out the prag book linked above and see for your self. In a bit I’m going to post about ErUnit, the xUnit testing framework I wrote for Erlang. In the mean time, here’s my initial stab at a TextMate Erlang bundle.

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04.19.07

Expertitis

Posted in Software Development, Buddha at 3:40 pm by BestFriendChris

ex·pert (ĕk’spûrt’)

I’ve been thinking a lot about experts lately. This came about, as most things do, from several areas in my life.

First of all, I recently read a book called Freakonomics. While I did enjoy the book (heartily recommend it in fact), I was really surprised by the disdain the authors had for “experts”. The bulk of the issues they had seemed to be focused on two things. Not only are some of these experts making unverifiable (or sometimes flat out wrong) statements about how things are, but everyday people are taking these statements as reality. For example: A parent hears on CNN (from an expert, of course) that a teenager killed his classmates because of a game. So, of course they do the sensible thing and not allow their kids to play violent games. While whether this is a good decision is debatable, but my point here is they are basing a decision of how to raise their child on the statements of a person that CNN has labeled an “Expert”. Statements that seem to make “common sense” are rarely even questioned.

The other area this line of thought came from was actually from the other end of the spectrum. At my job, we are actually hired by clients to be experts. On my first client, since I had the most experience with fit and subversion, I was labeled the “fit expert” and the “svn expert”. One thing to keep in mind is the extent of my fit experience was a two hour class a month before.

Now, I’ve never considered myself as an expert in anything. I was good, but expert? Anyway… One of the things I learned from this experience is that when you are the expert, people came to you when they have problems. Now, starting out I really only knew a little more than everybody else. As the project moved on with everybody asking me questions that I dutifully looked up, I really did become an expert on fit. An interesting thing started to happen, though. By being steeped in the domain, I started to be able to make educated guesses about what the problem they were experiencing without know for sure. Most of the time I was either right, or right enough that it got them to a solution.

I think that this is the point where problems can start to happen.

ex·pert·i·tis (ĕk’spûrt’-ī’tĭs)

When you, as some sort of expert, get to the level where you understand your domain fundamentally, it becomes really easy to believe that you are the domain. What I mean by this is you feel that you are effectively infallible when it comes to your expertise. Effectively infallible because, while you know that you very well could be wrong, you know you are able to recover from any mistakes you make. It’s a powerful thing having the kind of confidence like that.

Unfortunately, this kind of confidence doesn’t translate well. Laypeople (by this I mean non-experts) rely on experts to help them get thru or understand situations they are not able to handle themselves. What they want is a 100% correct, actionable answer, right now. The reality is that usually they will only 2 of the 3¹. Either it is correct right now, but so general as to be not useful, or it is correct and actionable… after 5 years of research. The most common case, however, is an actionable answer right now that is more or less correct… -ish. Some experts will never give an answer like that. They, of course, don’t end up on CNN. I believe that most of those who do aren’t bad people, however. They aren’t just trying to get famous. They just don’t see anything wrong with giving an answer that they personally think has a 70% chance of being correct. The problem is laypeople don’t have the experience to be able to recover from those mistakes, so they either go to another expert, or swear off experts entirely (not easy to do nowadays…).

Another example of this situation is when you take a car in to the shop. The mechanic is an expert in automobiles. So, when you hear a clicking sound when you are driving, he can make some informed opinions about what the issue is. He might take those opinions and decide on a course of action. Say, replace a belt. He doesn’t think about warning you that he’s only 70% sure because most of the time, in that situation, he is right. So, if you find out later that you still have the problem, you get mad at him and take it to a competitor.

ex·per·tec·to·my (ĕk’spûr-t’ĕk’tə-mē)

I think the important thing to take away from this is that Experts are people too (some of them at least). Rely on them when you need to, but keep in mind that they could be wrong.

Expert /= Infallible.

1. This is what I believe differentiates experts from other people. Experts usually get 2/3, non-experts get 1/3. Nobody get 3/3 consistently.

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04.11.07

New Twitter badge

Posted in General, Software Development at 3:53 pm by BestFriendChris

So, I just recently (about 3 hours ago) discovered the wonderful site Twitter.com. The gist of it is it allows you an easy (insanely so) way of letting people know what you’re doing. It’s pretty addictive. There are three things I especially like about this service.

1. You have only 140 characters to type what you’re doing. This way not only do I not feel obligated to go on and on about what I’m doing, I’m actively forbidden to. Nice.
2. You can send a text message from your phone to update what you’re doing. Perfect for when you’re out and about.
3. You can set it up to remind you if you haven’t updated it in more than 24 hours (by text, natch). Should keep the updates from getting stale.

I searched around and found this post about how to get a list of the last 10 tweets on your website. Since it didn’t quite work for me, and I’m kinda anal when it comes to code, I fixed it up a bit. Essentially I fixed the bug in it that would cause it to fail if you have less than 10 tweets in your account and I removed the duplication of the count of tweets the javascript returns. Also, I added in a few extra “span”s for my css to make it all pretty.

You can find the code after the jump…

Read the rest of this entry »

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