May 26, 2012
GeeCon - Testing hell and how to fix it # The last regular talk I went to was on testing hell at Atlassian – in particular the JIRA project. What happened to JIRA might actually be known to developers who have to deal with huge legacy projects that predate the junit and dependency injection era: Over time their test base grew into a monster that was hard to maintain and didn’t help at all with making developers confident on checkin time that they would not break anything.
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May 22, 2012
GeeCon - TDD and it’s influence on software design # The second talk I went to on the first day was on the influence of TDD on software design. Keith Braithwaite did a really great job of first introducing the concept of cyclomatic complexity and than showing at the example of Hudson as well as many other open source Java projects that the average and mean cyclomatic complexity of all those projects actually is pretty close to one and when plotted for all methods pretty much follows a power law distribution.
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May 21, 2012
GeeCon - Randomized testing # I arrived late during lunch time on Thursday for GeeCon – however just in time to listen to one of the most interesting talks when it comes to testing. Did you ever have the issue of writing code that runs well in your development environment but crashes as soon as it’s rolled out at customers only to find out that their Locale setting was causing the issues?
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April 22, 2012
Second steps with git # Leaving this here in case I’ll search for it later again - and I’m pretty sure I will.
The following is a simplification of the git workflow detailed earlier - in particular the first two steps and a little background.
When dealing with remotes the git remote documentation is very useful.
When sharing your changes with others the git tutorial on sharing changes is very helpful.
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February 9, 2012
Note to self - Java heap analysis # As I keep searching for those URLs over and over again linking them here. When running into JVM heap issues (an out of memory exception is a pretty sure sign, so can be the program getting slower and slower over time) there’s a few things you can do for analysis:
Start with telling the effected JVM process to output some statistics on heap layout as well as thread state by sending it a SIGQUIT (if you want to use the number instead - it’s 3 - avoid typing 9 instead ;) ).
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January 30, 2012
Dorkbot Berlin # c-base - 8p.m. on a Monday evening - the room is packed (and pretty cloudy as well): Time for Dorkbot, a short series of talks on “People doing strange things with electricity” hosted by Frank Rieger.
First talk up on stage was Gismo on Raumfahrtagentur - a Berlin maker-space located in Wedding. Originating from the presenter’s interest in electrical bikes a group of ten people interested in hardware hacking got together.
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January 5, 2012
One day later #
January 3, 2012
Fun little new toy # Yesterday Thilo invited me to attend an “Electronics 101” workshop including an introduction to soldering that was scheduled to start at 7p.m. this evening at the offices of IN-Berlin e.V.. As part of my studies back in university I do have a little bit of background in Electronics, but never before had tried any serious soldering (apart from fixing one of our audio cables) so I thought, why not.
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December 30, 2011
#28c3 # Restate my assumptions. One: Mathematics is the language of nature.
Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.
The above is a quote from today's "Hackers in movies" talk at 28c3 - which amongst others also showed a brief snippet of the movie Pi. For several years I stayed well away from that one famous Hackers' conference in Berlin that takes place annually between Christmas and New Year.
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February 25, 2011
Note to self: svn:ignore usage # Putting the information here to make retrieving it a bit easier next time.
When working with svn and some random IDE I’d really love to avoid checking in any files that are IDE specific (project configuration, classpath, etc.). The command to do that:
svn propedit svn:ignore $directory_to_edit
After issuing this command you’ll be prompted to enter file patterns for files to ignore or the directory names.
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