Duncan Pierce duncanpierce.org

In 2002 Paul Simmons and I put together the “Robocode workshop” (we changed the name later to Xbots) for XPDay 2.

It gives programmers a chance to try out their teamworking and continuous integration skills in a competition. The competition makes it a good environment for learning how to stay on process under pressure.

The new Agile Narratives website is now ready for use. We’re still a little way behind entering the index data on the stories we’ve collected but many have now been done and we’re ploughing through the remainder.

#aSelector do {
    aSelector: Output write "I did it";
}

I’ve recently been working at Goonhilly Downs, the largest satellite earth station in the world. The site, owned by British Telecom, is near the southernmost tip of the UK, at the Lizard Peninsula, and has line of sight to satellites over the Atlantic and, just barely, the Indian ocean. John Bilkey was good enough to give me the VIP tour of the site, and it was quite amazing.

Software development is fast becoming a configuration activity (“plumbing” as I like to call it), with many simple applications requiring very little true programming. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with this “plug it together” approach - it’s been working well for Unix scripting for 30 years - and we should be happy that we’re getting this level of relatively easy reuse.

I’m starting to move away from Law-of-Demeter-esque TDD unit testing, and towards Michael-Feathers-style inflection-point testing (regardless of whether it’s legacy code or not). And why? My work on very fine-grained objects in Kew has prompted some changes in my thinking.

This article is now a little out of date, but still contains some hopefully useful advice about laptops.

Laptops are generally more expensive and less powerful than desktop computers. However, machines are now so powerful that unless you want to play the latest games you shouldn’t really have any problems. If you do want to play games, a laptop is not a good choice.

In September 2003 some friends and I went on a Via Ferrata climbing holiday in the Italian Dolomites. We experienced lightning “up close and personal”….

Via Ferrata are scrambling- and climbing-grade routes, mostly at high level, protected by fixed metal cables attached at regular points to the rock. The cable is what makes it a Via Ferrata - Iron Way.

Some of my best thoughts come to me in the bath in the mornings, though I’m not claiming this is one of them. This morning I was thinking about blogging, and the uses people put it to. Somehow my mind wandered back to a TV show from the 1980s: “Doogie Howser, MD”.

I recently had a tip from Nat Pryce about a weird control construct from HScheme: call-with-result. It passes into a function an argument which is its own result. Erm, okay. Let’s just think about that for a second. It solves the “chicken and egg” problem of creating mutual references between objects - something you’re normally forced to use setters for. We can use something like this to get better encapsulation.