Viewing profile — mattvanhorn

Wow, Upwork comes out looking worse than the asshole who was abusing the system. Wasn't expecting that. Guess the world is just full of assholes and their enablers.

Real programming ended with Mel.

tl;dr: "Conceptual debt" is what Ward Cunningham described as "technical debt". That thing you call "technical debt" is just a combination of bad habits, haste and apathy.

Tell them to subpoena you - then the choice to testify is not yours any more. You'll have to. But you can tell future employers that you were forced, if you'd like to.

I'm terribly saddened by this. It's a great genre bookstore, and although I have a kindle, I still love having dead tree books, especially ones I read for pleasure.

I worked at a place where the VPE would talk about technical debt as a mortgage. Yet they had a culture that abhorred paying down the debt through refactoring, and so it was more l…

I suppose that if you do keep things that small, it could work well to trash and rewrite. Plus it has the benefit of making you consider explicitly what is going/staying. Personall…

I agree with the general approach suggested in the article (in tests, write/assume the code you wish you had). But one detail ran counter to my personal practice. I don't believe t…

I think that Red-Green-Refactor is as much about learning to habitually look for and recognize the refactoring opportunities as it is about being meticulous in reacting to those op…

If "the design in your head" involves classes or functions, or any programming language dependent ideas, then it you are not doing TDD. I call this style test-first, or pseudo TDD.…

I think far too many people fail to make the distinction between designing an algorithm and designing a program (which implements it). This is why I have to watch co-workers create…

Only TDD the code that you don't want to waste time debugging later. Skip the parts where you have proven no edge cases exist. Skip the parts you are sure will never, ever, need to…

I still do a lot of decent work on a non-unibody MBP from 2008, so I think a 2009 model would still have some utility, but I would consider the price carefully - it might be more w…

I don't find implementing the tests very difficult at all - but I am comfortable with regular expressions, and ruby. It's no more burden to write step definitions than it is to wri…

I've posted a response here: http://mattvanhorn.com/2013/09/19/a-case-for-cucumber/

If you wear it, I can choke you with it. Also, don't confuse the sport with the art - the old vale tudo fights allowed everything but eye gouging and biting, but even those would n…

I was listening to Robson Moura (BJJ black belt) talk about why he loves the art so much. He said something like: when you walk out of a karate class, after a lot of sparring, you …

See also: http://acerminaro.blogspot.com/2007/05/ritual-cat-and-other-...

full disclosure: (I work for New Relic now) I've also used New Relic developer mode to identify requests that have too many queries, and optimize them. At my last job I cut the que…

Personally, I'd like to see some of the smart folks in the community assist the police in identifying the source of the threats and helping to ensure that those miscreants get jail…

In the words of Clint Eastwood's character in Unforgiven: "'Deserve's got nothin' to do with it" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpDkYZWeeVg ) I'm "entitled" to a market rate. I'm…

answer() has a void return, although I suppose you might be able to watch System.out to see if it worked.

...and that you can remove all the existing ones and insert your own.