Monthly Archives: December 2008

not all data is interesting

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history of the Santa tracker

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rails 2 day 4: rcov and more behavior-driven development

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situated learning through open source

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ABCD book

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rails 2 day 3: behavior-driven development

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test- and behavior-driven development

I did a bit of reading about test-driven development (TDD), which led me to behavior-driven development (BDD). I started out by looking at some slides on TDD by Andrzej Krzywda which provide a nice overview:

TDD (at a high level) is about visualizing goals
Software developers are responsible for the visualization of other people’s goals
Guidelines:

write tests [...]

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language changes the way you think

“A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing.”  — A. Perlis
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aka linguistic relativity hypothesis) asserts lanugage influences how you think, that “different language patterns yield different patterns of thought.” It seems like the Heisenberg uncertainty principal, where measuring a particle also affects it. Dave [...]

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the decline of women in CS from 1940-1982

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getting started with rails 2 – day 2

In Day 1 with Rails, we built a simple application that let us manage a list of categories using the powerful generate scaffold script. Today, we’ll look under the hood and learn about the code that was created for us, so that we can modify the application to do just what we want (or, [...]

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