http://bestfriendchris.com/blog Wed, 27 Jun 2007 23:58:03 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Beware the Magical IPhone http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/06/27/finally-some-sanity/ Builds suck. Normally I’d rag on Ant, but I don’t really blame the tool (even if it does suck…). Ant doesn’t kill kittens, developers do. I think the fundamental problem is that nobody (ESPECIALLY developers) take a build seriously. The sad reality is that we treat a build system the ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/06/13/builds-suck/ This last weekend I went to New York for the first time EVAR. Here's what happened: Thursday night I took the train from Philly to Manhatten. It was not too expensive, so I went first class. I'm a huge fan of the train. You get on, like, 5 minutes before it leaves, ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/06/05/the-big-apple/ This is pretty funny. This guy used to teach animal husbandry to teen volunteers at a wildlife rehabilitation center. Later he had a kid. He assumed that his experience teaching the teens would help him understand raising his kid. Turns out, his experience working with animals was better training. Favorite quote? ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/05/31/parenting-lessons-from-animal-husbandry/ Ok. I know I already posted today, but this was just cool. A performance diagram comparing Apache to Yaws (An Erlang webserver). Apache dies at around 4,000 parallel sessions, while yaws still works at 80,000. Amazing. http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/05/11/apache-vs-yaws/ I recently was pointed to this article by pragdave about test-first development in Erlang with EUnit. I'm going to use his examples to show you how it would be done in ErUnit instead. First, some history... The reason I wrote ErUnit instead of just using EUnit is for a couple of ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/05/11/eunit-vs-erunit/ I recently rediscovered the wonderful Movies in 15 Minutes. If you've never heard of this, you really need to check it out. Cleolinda Jones is a genius. *joygasm* She also has a book out. The odd thing is that while she's born and raised here in the united states, you can't ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/05/03/m15m/ I just received an email from Hammacher Schlemmer announcing their brand new sale: Words fail me1. I'm just wondering who decided that May 2nd was the best time to sell/buy pre-lit chris-mas trees... I suppose the bigger question is, "Will they stay lit all the way into December, or should I ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/05/02/chris-mas-comes-early/ 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 ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/04/30/citcon-north-america-07/ 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 ... http://bestfriendchris.com/blog/2007/04/23/erunit-unit-testing-for-erlang/