devnulled: A stream for software developers and engineers

I’ve finally had a few minutes to grab a free machine at the Internet Cafe @ CFUNITED and having time to do more than just check e-mail quickly. I regret selling my backup laptop as it would be very nice to have here! Oh well, I still see myself picking up an Intel based Powerbook whenever those finally arrive…

This is really the first big CF conference I’ve been to (the ones I’ve been to in Denver were nice, but maybe 1/4 the size of this one) and I’d have to say it’s well worth it! It’s great to put faces to names to people I know of from various ColdFusion/Macromedia entities, as well as discuss various issues with said people. I’ve certainly got a few ideas to jump on once I’m back in the “real world”…

In general I’ve learned more breadth than depth in the sessions which I’ve attended, but it’s been a good exposure to see the ways that people are leveraging ColdFusion, talk with people about various issues I’ve encountered, and generally sparking new ideas. I’d say the presentation which I’ve enjoyed the most thus far was Sean Corfield’s presentation on Enterprise Integration with ColdFusion. The biggest reason being that I’ve been developing similar back-end applications in CF for the past couple of years, and it’s good to see it being used in a similar manner in an organization much bigger than mine with much success. Also knowing a bit more about JMS is fairly valuable and I’d like to play around with it sometime…

I’ve also gained insight into the various new technologies on the horizon which I haven’t been all that exposed to. SQL Server 2005 looks to be a pretty major release as does IIS 7. Joel Spolosky’s keynote as well as “Project Management the Joel Way” (which truth be told, was the verbalization of an entry on his site) were both great.

Tomorrow’s keynote should prove to be interesting as someone from myspace.com will be talking about how they’ve scaled their quickly growing site (depending on where you get your stats from, their site is anywhere from the top 10 to top 30 trafficed sites on the internet).

Pardon the lack of contexual links and any misspellings– I’m just trying to jot a few notes down and go grab some food before the blogger BOF session in about an hour. I’ll come back and clean it up later so a permanent record of this jackassery is not around.

I’ll be spending the remainder of the week/weekend in DC, but will try to post a more detailed entry once I get back, as well as photos I’ve taken (if any of them don’t suck) on Monday if I get a chance. I haven’t really been much around DC yet, but that’s the plan for this weekend…

Okay, I’m finally packed for the flight to DC tomorrow en route to CFUNITED. Well, truth be told, I probably spent most of my time figuring out what 40 GB slice of my insane 164 GB Mp3 collection would be appropriate for the next 5 days. I kind of doubt I’ll be checking e-mail and the like too often as I don’t have a laptop yet, but I will be taking photos to post later, notes, etc.

I’ll be in the conference Wed-Friday, then exploring DC until late Sunday afternoon as I fly back to Denver on Sunday evening.

See ya there!

I came across an old post from Bruce Eckel about his experiences with Python (my favorite scripting language) and how it’s shaped his opinion of strong typing. Instead of using strong typing, he suggests using loose typing and strong testing.

But without a full set of unit tests (at the very least), you can’t guarantee the correctness of a program. To claim that the strong, static type checking constraints in C++, Java, or C# will prevent you from writing broken programs is clearly an illusion (you know this from personal experience). In fact, what we need is Strong testing, not strong typing.

A very interesting read, especially considering his strong involvement in C++ and Java over the past 20 years or so.

I came across a post with advice about dating a developer from Matt Mullinweg’s blog. Granted it’s very particular to her situation, but in general it’s a good read.

For the record, I only have a few geek shirts and usually just wear them around the house or when I’m working-out. I have yet to have someone compliment me on my FreeBSD shirt, but the Chicks Dig UNIX shirt always draws a lot of mixed comments.

Last week I decided it was time to start looking at integrating the check-out of code from Subversion as a part of my build process for the various projects I work on. Turns out, it’s pretty easy.

Download the CLI Subversion client and install it. You may need to reboot afterwards (I rebooted my machine in the process of getting this to work, so it’s possible that the path variable changed then.)

Below are a few snips from one of my build.xml files which pull the code out of Subversion using the CLI client. It probably won’t be formatted correctly (something seems to be tripping up the code tag), but I’ll check it out later.


<property name="root.dir" value="${basedir}"/>

<target name="checkoutBuild" description="Pulls code from Subversion into the build directory">
<exec executable="svn">
<arg line="co ${svn.projecturl} ${project.build.root} -r ${svn.revision} --username ${svn.username} --password ${svn.password}"/>
</exec>
</target>