Archive for September, 2006

Thank you Eddie Hobbs

After looking at our National Hero Eddie Hobbs on the TV in shows like Show me the money and Rip-off Republic, I decided to take a bit of his advice.   My SSIA matured a couple of months back and left me with an extra €250 a month that I had been saving for the last 5 years.  I decided to ignore all the banks advice about all the great loans and extra debt that I could get myself into with my €250.  I instead increased my repayments on my mortgage by €250 per month.  

I had expected that this would reduce the term of my loan by a couple of years.  I was really shocked when I got a letter from the bank on Friday informing me that I had just knocked 8 years off my mortgage!!!  This is also saving me a small fortune on interest. 

Thank you Eddie Hobbs, you now have a fan for life  :)

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New Speakers for Barcamp

It looks like Trinity Venture Capital will be speaking at Barcamp Ireland this year. This grassroots event is gaining a lot of support from businesses in Ireland.  There is a great mix of both techie and business related talks to keep everyone entertained for the day.

 

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Google Release AJAXSLT

Google have just released AJAXSLT.

…an implementation of XSL-T in JavaScript, intended for use in fat web pages, which are nowadays referred to as AJAX applications.

I'm looking forward to playing around with this.  I have being doing a lot of work with XSLT lately so it will be interesting to see how Google have married this with AJAX. 

 

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So what are Code Reviews?

I became interested in code reviews while working with Accenture Ireland. As part of my role I was responsible for introducing code reviews into the project and insuring that they took place.  It was amazing to see the difference a 15 minute discussion of a piece of code or a design document could improve the overall quality of the project.  As more people are aware of the design for an early stage.  It also serves to educate more junior developers on the team.  Srivaths Sankaran presents a good overview of code reviews in this article.  It will give you a good background in to why we perform Code reviews and the many aspect of a code review.   He concludes his article by saying:

…..You can conduct thorough code reviews without succumbing to time pressures. Did you know that more than 60 percent of the defects can be captured by effective use of peer reviews (c.f., Boehm and Basili's Software Defect Reduction Top 10 List )? With a judicious combination of automation, interactive tools, and risk-based evaluation, you can reap the benefits of early problem detection…..

One piece of advice I would say is to remember that the primary goal of Code reviews is to improve quality and educate developers.   It is not a witch hunt!

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