RoB Murdock

Discovering Kotlin

Been quiet for a few weeks, so I feel overdue for a post. A post I say! So here’s what’s been going on in Rob-world.

It’s coming in late, but here is the Coupling yearly round-up for 2022!

In the foggy past of 2017, I wrote a short paper called “Metrics for Continuous Integration”. It consists of a semiformal model of how software teams produce work, and how to use that model to measure things that have meaning.

Back in 2020, I wrote a series of essays. Now, I’m going to do a short series revisiting some of these pieces. I want to explore what still stands up, where my thinking has evolved, and what I feel I could have communicated better. Just generally improve as a writer and thinkster 1. Ok, thinkster is just me playing with words. Not sure what it means! Gangster of thought? Probably not. It feels good coming out of the mouth though. Thinkster. Thinkster. Thinkster. Way better than the pretentious and weighty “thought-leader”. Mind-worker (ick!). Ok, sidebar over, carry on. ↩

Over the last year and a half or so, my coworkers and technical friends have probably grown tired of hearing me talk about “Immutable Web Apps”. “Sounds nice!” they say, politely suppressing their confusion and disinterest.

Alright, quick update on Coupling. 2020 was a crazy year in so many ways, and as such I wasn’t sure if people were going to really continue to use the app - between big shake-ups at companies that were using it, and this little thing called a global pandemic making everyone retreat to working at home… well, there were a lot of variables, so I didn’t really get my hopes up that it would be a year of growth or anything.

It feels like my job in life has become akin to the Scooby-Doo gang. I keep finding problems wearing technical masks, and yanking them off, revealing “the real problem was human-nature the whole time!” So bear with me - things are about to get a little dense, a little galaxy-brain, and probably has some banalities sprinkled throughout. But hopefully when you get through this text-miasma, you will have a clearer understanding of what the real villain is, and maybe a thought or two about how to manage it. Deep breath… let’s go.

After rereading my last essay “The Test Ascent”, it occurred to me that I haven’t directly addressed the subject of “test-driving”, commonly encountered as TDD (test-driven development).

When trying to get better at testing generally, developers tend to cry out for guidelines and goals. How do I assess whether I’m improving or not? How do I make recommendations to my teammates? How do I know I’ve tested enough, or not enough? How do I balance the expense of taking time to write tests against time I could use to do other things?

So testing. What’s up with that?

Open workspaces are controversial.

Mea culpa!

What does it mean to be responsible?

Ok, hopefully the monday Queue Review isn’t an ongoing thing. But hey! The highlights:

Yep, review is late this week. Here’s why: I put a lot of time into building out the Coupling Adventure games systems and didn’t come up for air until around 6pm on Friday.

A long time ago, to a company far, far away, George Lucas sold his pop-culture ziggurat for 4 billion dollars.

Ok. Mostly as a disciplinary measure, I’m hoping to post a short and sweet update here regarding the things I’ve been working on. Why’s that?

This month I’ve been putting some more time into verbalizing my professional goals and values, as I’ve had to explain and establish many core concepts over and over again. Now, I’m not saying that creating the content will alleviate that need (it won’t!), but I think having this clearly written and established will help people understand what they’re getting into when dealing with me.

Hello friends! It has been many a moon since I’ve updated this here rant-box, and its time to collect some thoughts!

I think about error handling a lot. Perhaps a shocking amount. I mean, it’s the first example I reach for when discussing programmer ethics. Its one of the first things I investigate when learning a new programming language. And my opinions (read: rants) on the topic tend to be long, detailed and interminable.

I’ve just published three new Gists, to my Gist page. The reason I haven’t posted here in a few weeks is that I’ve been nearly pathologically working on the Swift game I mentioned earlier. That game led me to develop these three libraries: Pledges, a Promise system for Swift ArmorXml, a system that augments RaptureXml with Pledges ArmorTestKit, a group of functions for simplifying testing Swift code using XCTest. This includes assertions designed for Pledges. Now, they haven’t been exposed to much light so far, and therefore I’m sure that there are usability quirks - if you try it out...

I’ve been powering through converting a lot more of my Java game code to Swift in this last week, and while doing so I’ve been trying my best to learn about the closure syntax provided. For example, this code snippet is made possible:

As I’ve been porting more and more code to Swift, I’ve noticed a problem emerge around 3-4 times already: when writing tests to measure the performance of a section of code, I frequently (though not always) run into EXC_BAD_ACCESS problems.

A little cross promotion to celebrate the release of Guardians of the Galaxy: my longtime compadre Jeff Jia and I run an utterly unprofessional pop-culture podcast. If you’ve been reading this blog and thinking “this would be a lot better if it was being read aloud, had a lot of extra swears, and was actually about Godzilla” then it is ideal for you. Its called Journey Into Mystery Science. The iTunes page is here and the related tumblr is here. And that’s all you’ll be hearing about those subjects on this blog - here we’re sticking to nice, clean, polite,...

Well, to get things rolling here I figured I’d start by talking a smidge about my most mature side-project - Coupling.