DaedTech Digest: Static Analysis, Doco and Dependency Death Stars
Happy Friday, everybody. I’m still figuring this digest thing out, so please bear with me. But no matter how I iterate, what you’ll get is an aggregated link to posts that I’ve written for my Hit Subscribe business.
I’m thinking I’ll do picks each week as well as the digests. You know how podcast panelists do “picks” at the end of a lot of podcasts? I’ll give you some picks each week. At least, unless this turns out to be a bad idea, in which case, I’ll stop.
Picks
- Jogging without headphones. For years, I’ve always doubled up on productivity by listening to podcasts or audio books while jogging, if not watching Pluralsight courses. But recently a terrible pair of bluetooth headphones (seriously, don’t buy them — shop around for a competitor) broke, and I just went jogging with my thoughts. It’s been a huge boost to the amount of creative thinking I do in a week.
- I cannot rave enough about payroll service, Gusto. If you need to run payrolls for your business, these guys make it seriously easy, even paying taxes for your automatically. Before I switched, I’d been using Intuit’s online payroll, which was the user experience equivalent of a grizzly bear carrying a raccoon in a backpack and both of them are mauling you. Gusto restored my faith in humanity.
- Every now and then, I get nostalgic for computer games from my childhood. When I do, abandonia usually has me covered.
The Post Digest
And now, the post digest.
- I write a lot of posts about static analysis, since it’s something of a specialty of mine. Here’s another primer I did about it for TechTown training. In it, I evangelized a bit, encouraging readers to look past the really dull name and see that underneath it lies a cool concept.
- Speaking of static analysis, I wrote a post for NDepend entitled “Code Quality Metrics: Separating the Signal from the Noise.” There’s a lot of reductionist code metrics out there, so I did my part to add some nuance to the world.
- For SubMain, I wrote a post taking you through different documentation tool options that programmers have. User manuals, release notes, and all the traditional stuff, but then also new approaches that generate documentation automatically, at least for a starting point.
- In another NDepend post, I talk about a novel way to settle the inevitable squabbles among a development team. Make your arguments, and then prove them visually, using automated tooling to paint pictures of your codebase. My personal favorite for proving a point has always been the dependency death star.
- And, finally, I wrote a post for Monitis trying to get a little more specific around the generalized and often hype-y term, “big data.” This post took a longer view, tracing a history of the concept back to the early days of Java and .NET.
