Automated refactoring for library updates
After watching Clang MapReduce – Automatic C++ Refactoring at Google Scale I was struck with the idea that this could help with the upgrade problem. Almost every application uses libraries. …
Software Development
Metrics based Refactoring for cleaner code
Refactoring is a key practice to improved code hygiene. Making refactoring part of your next project is one thing but if you have just joined a team or project with a significant amount of debt how do …
Oh My ZSH shell productivity
oh-my-zsh is framework for managing zsh configuration. The default configuration adds some interesting enhancements. The following shows all the Java files in the current and sub directories. ls …
Encapsulating Databases
Small systems grow with success. As these systems grow they often take on more and more functionality either directly into the main system component or into sub-systems. As the systems grow in …
Insulating against failure using Caching Reverse Proxies
Reverse proxies have been around for a very long time and depending on your application either interesting additions or a key element to your architecture. Despite their long history I was recently …
Open Source project durations
During a recent discussion about open source development we wondered how long these projects lasted. In particular if there was a rapid drop off in activity. One of the great things about recent open …
Stabilizing Velocity
I came across this post by Michael Norton and thought I would reference it here: Stabilising Velocity Michael makes some keen observations on both causes and effects of unstable velocity. Predictable …
Create MySQL database with Capistrano
I was playing about with Capistrano over the weekend. I wanted to automate the deployment of a Rails application to my server. The server was (I thought) just about ready to accept the app but I did …
Rake db:migrate MySQL gem dependency
If you have already added gem ‘mysql2’ to your Gemfile but get a message saying that it is missing when you try to migrate Make sure that you have installed libmysql-ruby sudo apt-get …
Progressive Enhancement
Progressive Enhancement is a web development technique or pattern. The basic premise is that a web site should be accessible to all users and then to overlay additional functionality based on the …