DaedTech Digest: Test Smells, Monitoring, Performance, Spell Check

Hello, everybody.  It’s yet another week in my life where I successfully keep track of the normal work week without losing track of which days are the weekend and which aren’t.  To celebrate, here’s another DaedTech Digest Friday post.

And, lest you think that I lose track of days of the week due to a life of intense leisure, I can assure you otherwise.  We’re busily building Hit Subscribe, expanding our client base, our operations and our authorship.  We’re calling specialists and aspiring specialists to help us with paid post writing.  Drop me a line if you’re interested, either in writing or just in becoming a specialist.  I’m getting more serious about building some courses for aspiring free agents.

But that aside, let’s get to this week’s picks.

Picks

• Last week, I accidentally crushed my phone, and today, I have a brand new one, despite being on the road without access to mail or normal logistics.  I’d like to pick Sprint for making that happen and generally being good from start to almost-finish.  I say “almost” because the phone activation process and their dial in menu was broken enough to prompt this rage tweet before I calmed down.  But everything else about the process was great.  Honestly.
  

  Also, your automated phone system is like a digital minefield in that it’s treacherous to navigate, has catastrophic results and makes me pray for my own death to end the miserable suspense.

  — Erik Dietrich (@daedtech) December 7, 2017

• The plugin I use to look at search volume, Keyword Keg, added a new feature that’s really cool.  “Analyze this page” shows you every imaginable keyword on a given web page, along with volume and competition.  Give it a look.
• In spite of Medium seeming to try to turn itself into some kind of paywall or something, I managed to read this piece about programmers getting qualified from doing other stuff.  I feel as though the author is an efficiencer in spirit.
• If you know me well, you know that I plug Trello early and often.  In the last couple of weeks, a few people I introduced it to a while ago have casually dropped into conversation how integral it now is to their lives.

DaedTech Post Digest

• For the Rollout blog, I took the position that feature flag management systems can save you from technical debt.  Implemented reactively, feature flags slapped into your codebase pile onto the technical debt.  But if you get out in front of things with a sophisticated management strategy, you can tip the scales the other way.
• For the SubMain blog, I took a look at the problem of implementing a C# spell check.  Seems straightforward enough, but things can get weird.
• For NDepend’s blog, I wrote a piece about how you can use NDepend to get started and up to speed more quickly on .NET projects than you might otherwise be able to.
• I wrote a post for Monitis a while back, and it got a recent publish.  It was about the different kinds of application performance you should test.
• On the Scalyr blog, I wrote a post about why you need log monitoring.
• And, finally, I wrote a piece about “unit test smells” for the Tech Town blog.

Happy reading, and happy weekend to everybody.

DaedTech Digest: Code Quality, Feature Flags, and Physical Migration

Happy Friday, everybody.  It’s DaedTech Digest time today.

I am just wrapping up my work week and preparing to spend all day tomorrow (today, by the time you read this) driving south to the US Gulf Coast for the next 5 weeks.  Why?  Because it’s cold where I am in Michigan, and it’s not cold down there.

We’re planning a winter/early spring where we split time between a town called Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, San Diego, and Mesa Arizona.  So if you live in any of those places and have suggestions for places to go or meetups to attend, I’m all ears!

Picks

• If you like posts along the lines of the one I made Wednesday, then I suggest a couple of podcasts.  First, the Freelancer’s show, and second, the podcast of one of the panelists, Jonathan Stark, called Ditching Hourly.  They talk a lot about positioning, marketing, getting business, and getting away from the trap of hourly billing.
• If you have any interest in SEO and keyword research, I recommend a Chrome plugin called Keyword Keg.  I use this constantly for my content business to help look for good blog topics.  When you do Google searches, it shows you the keyword volume right inline.
• Speaking of my content business, I’ll do a plug for the Hit Subscribe blog.  The blog is aimed at teaching techies to use blogging to advance their business interests.  So if you want to learn about blogging, give it a look.
• On the coding side, I’ve been enjoying Shouldly a lot for its unit testing assertion semantics.

DaedTech Post Digest

• In a post I wrote for SubMain, I ask the question of whether you’re trying to aggressively automated code review.  I’ve noticed that we, as developers, can easily look at what others are doing and detect a need (or potential) for automation.  But we often have a blindness for our own work.
• Here’s a post I did for NDepend that walks you through the evolution of static code analysis.  Starting with basic linting and getting more and more sophisticated, this technique has come a long way.
• For the ASPE training blog, I mused on the subject of code quality at kind of a philosophical level.
• For one of our newer blogging clients, Rollout, a feature flag management system, I wrote about… wait for it… feature flags.  Well, actually, I wrote about how feature flag management systems let you build apps more quickly.
• And, to round it out, I had a little fun writing about code review myths for SubMain.

Have a good weekend!

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.

DaedTech Digest: Agile, Code Review Horror Stories, Test Smells

First of all, some housekeeping.  Back when I finally gave Disqus the boot, it reverted comment settings to WordPress’s defaults.  One of these was, apparently, to turn off comments after 28 days.

Sorry about that.

Backlink spammers notwithstanding, I welcome comments on posts new and ancient.  So I want to be clear that I did not do this intentionally.

Alright, now, back to business.  I’m bringing you the second installment of the DaedTech digest wherein I aggregate some of my posts instead of cross posting.  The feedback on this format has, so far, been positive, inasmuch as I’ve gotten it.  So let me know if you have thoughts one way or the other.

This is part of a pivot that I’m planning with DaedTech, for which I’m currently ideating a bit on a mission statement for the blog.  I’m thinking at the moment that the mission, going forward, will be “helping software developers become the boss of their software development.”  This could include opportunist plays to earn promotions in the office as well as help with side hustles and going free agent.

And Now, the Digest

But, I digress.  Onto the digest.  Note that these posts are ones that I wrote some time back.  I’m doing beefed up digests to catch up, and then I’ll start linking you to the various posts I’ve written for clients during the week.

• I wrote a post for TechTown Training (ASPE) about the relationship between agile development and refactoring.  This echoes the dynamic that Martin Fowler once referred to as “flaccid Scrum” where organizations “go agile” by having different meetings, but approaching the software they same way.  I talk about how you need to change your software practices as well.
• Here’s an intro style post that I wrote on the topic of static analysis for NDepend.  I’ve always found that people tend to needlessly over-academic-ize static analysis, so I figured I’d treat the world to a less self-important explanation.
• For Submain, I wrote a post called “Code Review Horror Stories.”  I’d say this probably speaks for itself.
• Another one for TechTown called “Unit Testing Smells: What Are Your Tests Telling You?”  I think this is an important topic because all too frequently I see people have a hard time testing their code and conclude that unit testing sucks.  If your code is hard to test, something is wrong with your code.
• And, finally, I did another CodeIt.Right, Rules Explained Post.

Anyway, I think that 5 a week should eventually get us current.  But, if not, I’ll crank up the juice on these.  Man, putting these together, I realize that I write a LOT of blog posts.  I guess it’s no accident that I wound up founding a blogging business.