Barry's Blog

Recently I watched David Heinemeier Hanson's controversial railsconf keynote and I thought I'd express my views. His main argument suggests TDD is dead. Oddly I agree with many of his headline views which I try to document below. I just not convinced of his supporting arguments. DHH appears to have a dim view on TDD practicing developers; whom he generalises write simple unit tests having 100% code coverage, use many mocks, but test nothing real. His example was a bug in Basecamp which lost customer data, their code had 100% code coverage, but still didn't work. I really doubt there are many developers who just stop when they hit 100% unit test coverage? I'm not going to speak for everyone else; I only started using TDD (not exclusively) about 18 months ago despite 12 years developer experience writing some really cool stuff, some well designed and some not so well... The well designed stuff has tended to be driven by TDD. I've never used code metrics, I use...

We purchased an iPad last year for my son to use and in the year he has become eerily proficient with the touchscreen interface. The educational applications have been very good and still use it for this purpose; however more recently it is being used as a video player... Whilst I'm not particularly against this, I would rather he start creating content rather than merely consuming it. One problem with being used to touchscreen is the keyboard and mouse paradigm is alien - it must be really weird to have to press a keyboard key located somewhere else. I imagine using a keyboard for the first time would be like writing notes on a piece of paper but the ink actually appears on a different pad. Anyway, keyboards are here to stay and I want my son to learn how to use a keyboard as well as learn the alphabet (he is already pretty good at numbers). Therefore as part of my Raspberry Pi setup, I purchased a Duragadget keyboard for my son to use, this has large keys, lower case letters...