DaedTech Digest: Bad Code, Evils of Coverage, Spending Your Money

Happy Friday, DaedTech readers.  I’m at three in my streak of DaedTech digest posts.  So far, so good.

If you’ll recall, last week I introduced the idea of “picks,” so let’s continue with that for starters.

Picks

• (Shameless plug alert)  Someone asked me on Twitter today about finding an epub version of my book, Developer Hegemony.  While I generally link to its Amazon page, I did self-publish it through Leanpub.  If you go there and purchase it, you can download it as an epub, a mobi, or a pdf.
• If you use Hootsuite to manage social media, I strongly recommend their new Beta composer.  I was actually on the fence about letting my subscription elapse, but that changed my mind — I’m that impressed.
• If you track your site’s SEO at all, Moz has introduced a cool new feature that lets you look up all of a site’s keyword rankings.
• And, finally, I bought this roof rack for Jeep Grand Cherokees to haul stuff as we trek around this winter.  If you happen to have a roof rack-less Jeep, I haven’t tested it extensively yet, but install was a breeze and it fit perfectly.

DaedTech Post Digest

Alright, onto the digest.  Here are some posts of mine you might want to check out.

• I wrote a post for SubMain entitled, “5 Things Responsible for Your Poor Code Quality“.  One of them probably will surprise nobody reading: a lack of automated unit tests.  But there’s more to it than just unit tests.
• I took a strong position on code coverage for NDepend.  I don’t think management should worry about or track code coverage.  If management is involved at this level, the team has much deeper problems than making Jenkins happy with branch coverage.
• In a bit of a change of pace, I gave advice for the ASPE training blog about how to spend your training budget as a developer.  I related your training budget to that parable about filling a jar with rocks, pebbles, sand, and water.  So if that sounds interesting, give it a read.
• I wrote a post for SauceLabs about how to use Selenium Web Driver to improve your web applications.  It includes an introduction to the tool, its backstory, and its value proposition.  If you’re not familiar with Selenium, have a look, because you’re the target audience.
• And, finally, another post for SubMain about moving beyond using the HTML help file if you want to distribute documentation.  This is certainly a tried and true old friend for longtime .NET developers, but you’ve got better options these days.