A little background . . .

Joel Spolsky writes articles about software development and often times ends up saying that unit tests aren’t important because they don’t ship and take programmers away from writing more features or a new produce (well, that’s my less than 140 version of his stance on spending time doing unit tests).  Rob Conery, a former Microsoft employee that also write articles about software development wrote an article about how Joel is hurting the industry and needs to shut up.  Below is my response that I left in Rob’s blog.  Rob even responded!

I’m an apologist . . . I admire both of them.  As a debater I can take either side!

But Jim said something that stuck with me and that is we need people on the far left and the far right of issues so that we can pull the reasonable people toward the middle and reach a consensus.  If there are no crazy people on the left then you end up with solutions that lean right!

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I read “duct tape programmers” and came away thinking Joel was putting down programmers who used the duct tape method of getting things done even though that’s exactly the opposite of what was there.  Maybe that’s because I’ve read all these articles from him about how important the craft is and how writing maintainable code is so important and blah blah blah.  And now Zawinski is a hero for not caring about any of that?!?

I think the point of the article is that a) anyone who cares about what they do wants to do things the “right” way and b) doing it the right way gets in the way of shipping.  Strive for the golden mean!

Oh yeah, lets not forget about the secret that the “right” way isn’t defined and never will be because things change so much and once we figure out the right way someone is going to come along with something cooler, faster, easier.  Damn you Ruby!  Damn you Python!  And of course, damn you C# . . . you are so much safer than C but C is the right way . . . it’s the only way . . . and Joel said if I don’t know C I am useless!

Sheldon

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Yesterday I checked the status of my House Party application for the Windows 7 Launch Party I was hyping up with several friends and was *sorely* disappointed to see a red dot and something about how it wasn’t going to happen and how there were lot of applicants and they were sorry blah blah blah.  I had been thinking about my funny retort and how MS dropped the ball once again!  I was going to use the following key phrases:

• LAN Party
• Carne Asada (thin sliced marinated beef for the people not from AZ)
• XBOX 360 Halo with 4 players!  I have 4 controllers already.
• Try to convince a friend to bring his flat screen and XBox 360 for 8 player action!
• At least 3 of my computers set up with Windows 7 (for demos and maybe we can play Halo or some other game with the XBox people) and a few others set up for some AoE action late in the night!
• I already have a Kegerator with Kiltlifter and it’s more than 50% full!

It was going to be an epic post!  But then look what happened:

I’m an “Active Applicant”!  Don’t let me down Microsoft!

Sheldon

P.S.  I know MS has no control over getting me a party invite but I’m going to blame them anyway if I don’t get in.

Gmail changed my life and I have no right to complain . . . but this is driving me crazy!

I try to block people (using the chat interface there on the left) and it doesn’t work . . . they still show up and can see I’m online and then when I go back to check they are not blocked.   Plus, people that have more than one email address show up on the chat list several times I guess once for every email address.  That’s annoying but I can deal with it.

It all happened around the time that Google Contacts came out (even before the cool, easy to remember URL).  I wish I could submit a bug report or something.

UPDATE:  I just tried to block again to verify it wasn’t working and now it looks like it *IS* working.  We’ll see though.  Now I just need to figure out who is blocked and who isn’t.

Sheldon