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.