Mar 30
Last week i got myself a 17″ Apple Powerbook. I’ve been wanting to check both hardware and OS X out for a long time. The combo of a Free BSD like core and the interface reputation of Apple seemed like an attractive combination.
Not sure if it is yet, but so far I haven’t been able to concentrate much on work ;-). Two things which stand out:
- There is much more to play out there than is healthy for a person
- I completely underestimated the way you set your machine to your hands to work efficiently, i feel completely disabled using the new machine.
Let’s see if that changes over the next few weeks.
Mar 19
Last week we started implementing a unit testing framework for Xaraya, which is highly integrated with the bitkeeper repository.
As of now it allows you to register testsuites and testcases which can be run once or repeatedly with
bk tests
I expected this to be an investment for the long run. The longer we used it, sometimes the tests would fail and we could fix things
more quickly. To my surprise the tests started failing basically right from the beginning, even when very premature code was available.
Both bugs in the testframework as in the codebase itself showed up immediately.
I found that the crux to this is that having a test framework puts your mind in a different state. While developing you’re trying to make things work, while writing tests you’re trying to make things break. This combination has worked already in the early stages, i can hardly wait to see how this is going to work when the number of tests starts to grow and we actually use that information in our process.
The scepsis has gone, unit testing rocks!