Scott Muc

As many of you know, I have left CBC Radio 3 and got a position as a Software Consultant with Thoughtworks Calgary. Considering that I have lived my entire life in the lower mainland of BC this is a big change. Not only am I leaving behind many friends and family, a beautiful city, and a great job, I...

Continue reading "A New Beginning (or Goodbye 20's, Hello 30's)"

Well, I did one of these last year and it helped give me some focus thoughout the year so I'm going to try it again. First off, here are some follow-ups to my resolutions of last year: Learn A New Build System - Learning a new build tool is not really something that you set out to learn I guess. The...

Continue reading "My Developer Resolutions For 2010"

Here's so more tidbits on my continuous tale of my workstation setup. These are my first tasks and installs that take place before any of the major applications get installed. For I don't know how long now I have been running Windows with the Task Bar at the top. My focus tends to be at the top of the...

Continue reading "Workstation Bare Essentials"

Hello world! Let me introduce myself. My name is PamCoutter , or at least that is the name my master gave me. He's some sort of GTD nut and thought it would cool to name me as an anagram of the word AtComputer. Yeah, he's that lame. Let me tell you a little bit about myself. Here's my dating profile...

Continue reading "Hello World! My Laptop Installation Blog"

Agile Vancouver is nearly over and after the bus ride home I had a great real world example of where Eric Evans' discussion on contexts in modelling was quite apparent. On my CBC messenger bag I have some buttons from some music artists I like. One of the buttons is for an artist named Ben Lee and the...

Continue reading "Contextual Lessons in DDD"

Like most OSS (Open Source Software), the creation for Secretary.Net was the result of the major pain I was having with my current work. The CBC Radio 3 website is very file and context heavy. The idea of a path to an image is meaningless without context. Is it the image for an Arist? How about a Concert...

Continue reading "Introducing Secretary.Net"

In a recent splurge I purchased 4 books from Manning Pres s with one of them being The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove. I would categorize myself as relatively new to unit testing. My first hands on testing was when I took the Nothing but .Net bootcamp with JP Boodhoo but he emphasized BDD style...

Continue reading "Book Review - The Art of Unit Testing by Roy Osherove"

Lines of code has always been a poor guide in measuring developer productivity. I'm currently reading Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming In Code and came across and interesting quote.

"Atkinson [ed: Bill] had just completed rewriting a portion of the Quickdraw code, making it more efficient and faster. The new version was 2000 lines of code shorter than the old one. What to report? He wrote the number -2000" -- Rosenberg

I couldn't help but smile when I read that. I have felt that some of my best coding successes are when I eliminate lots of code. This probably pushes Test Driven Development (TDD) as a great practice even further. Lately I've been a bit stricter by doing TDD. This means that I'm writing a lot more code, but as I get my tests passing I start refactoring and remove much of the code that's written. For every couple hundred lines of code I write, I eventually remove 50-80% of it as I glean knowledge from all the code I previously wrote.

It appears that LOC Rollercoaster development is an artifact of TDD and it's a great ride!

Continue reading "Riding The Lines-Of-Code Rollercoaster"

Ever since I've begun using NHibernate the number one thing that's caused me a lot of headaches is learning how to properly map my domain objects. Even the most basic mappings I wrote had bugs simple because I overlooked trivial items. This made me realize that I could save a lot of time and hassle if I unit tested by data access layer.

Continue reading "Unit Testing Domain Persistence With NDbUnit, NHibernate and SQLite"

I'm starting to get comfortable with NHibernate but I've been cowboy coding it without any testing framework to let me know if my mappings are really doing what I think they are doing. I'm starting to get tired of manually interacting with my applications to see if things work so I've begun the course...

Continue reading "When 1 Does Not Equal 1, A Debugging Tale"