Bookstore Haul: Volume 7 – Those Buddies of Mine

broderic on August 12, 2016

I tell my co-workers about who should be their best buddies. That term, the way I use it in this context, isn’t for people, but items – tools or techniques – that they should make themselves highly familiar with and which will make their daily chores better. Then there are the enemies, or rather, just one at the moment. Enemies again are tools that they need to battle with on a daily basis, a necessary evil.

I say my second buddy is my current Configuration Management tool. He will get you out of sticky situations. Don’t like the code you just wrote? Revert. Who broke the build? Blame. Need to explore alternatives? Branch. Need to deliver? Tag and release. A good CM tool is just the best.

My one and only enemy is Jenkins. It’s a Continuous Integration server. It is opaque to me. It’s got buttons that run jobs. But what they do? I don’t know. Then there are the happy weather, the sad weather, and the stormy skies. Stormy is bad. It always seems to be that.

Jenkins: The Definitive Guide is a book which I hope will make me understand Jenkins. And use it correctly. Eventually, the enemy will be an ally.

Git In Practice is a book to make my second good buddy a good buddy again. Lately, he’s been punching me in the face. I need to know why.

Bookstore Haul: Volume 2

broderic on May 22, 2016

A second time on the weekend? Yes, when I am truly bored with nothing to do. This time I went to the Columbia store because it has a better selection. I wonder why that is. Their computer book selection is 1000 times better. So is their manga. Throw it a more interesting cook book section, and it’s a wonder why I don’t go there often. Twenty-five miles away? O, that’s why.

Anywhoo, let’s look at what I bought today.

Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java 8 with JUnit. I’m starting to get into Test Driven Development. It’s not like I haven’t but at work I have a task where it fit right in to do TDD. As I write the code and the tests, I often wonder if I am doing it well. No one else at work has tried it this way. So I need advice and I usually find it in books. This one is the only one on UnitTesting that was at the store. I’m hoping to glean some advice from it and apply it to work.

Link of the Day [3.10.15]

broderic on March 11, 2015

What I felt when reading through today’s link the first time was resignation. I already knew that we gave up a lot of our freedom for the safe, security we needed to defeat a bunch of know-nothing, backwards scaremongers of the Middle East. But the more I read, the more I got angry.

What the hell man?! This is supposed to keep us safe? I feel safe already? FUDGE these guys.

Then the article started getting into some of the specifics. Like how the ‘white hat hackers’ are cracking our development tools to inject malicious code into our applications. That just makes me disgusted.

Is this our United States? Is this what we wanted? We wanted to feel safe for this? Thanks, W. FUDGE that guy. FUDGE you guys for giving in.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/03/10/ispy-cia-campaign-steal-apples-secrets

Link of the Day [7.01.14]

broderic on July 1, 2014

Because I need to step up my blogging game, here’s a post about visualizing algorithms. I think its rather cool, but YMMV.

I haven’t written much because no one’s been reading. I also need to write code. More code rather than blog posts. Need to write iOS code. Need to just code. I like this about algorithms though. It’s all about the code.

http://bost.ocks.org/mike/algorithms/