Jake Scruggs

The views and opinions expressed here are my own and don’t necessarily represent positions, strategies, or opinions of Backstop Solutions Group. Recently we released episode 3 of the Software Apprenticeship Podcast but had to pull it back for re-editing because of some problems with how developers talk to each other.  Developers are not kind to ANY code.  Even our own.  Especially our own.  Sitting next to a dev while he or she discusses the code they are working on can be a shocking experience.  Words like “Crap,” “Junk”, “Garbage” and many worse are used often.  A lot of this type of talk was on episode 3 and when someone at Backstop (who’s job it is to protect us from ourselves and comments taken out of context) heard it they asked us to edit the podcast to take out some of the more offensive comments. This is why episode 3 sometimes fades into music and then comes back mid-conversation.  Sorry about that. I don’t know where I first heard the defin...

This week we start off by throwing Jonathan into the deep end of pool where he pairs with an experienced developer on a 10 year old Java project that is the core of our signature product: Backstop.  Of course the company is called Backstop Solutions and so, in order to avoid confusion, we gave the project a different name for internal use:  Fund Butter.  The mystery of how such a terrible thing came to pass is revealed in this very episode. There’s no way we couldn’t discuss DHH’s Rails Conf declaration and blog post: “TDD is dead. Long live testing.” This, of course, leads to a discussion of our team’s test philosophy. You can find it on iTunes (search for Software Apprenticeship Podcast), any podcast app’s search function, Google, this temp page: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/software-apprenticeship-podcast/id868371146 or use the RSS feed directly if your into that sort of thing: http://softwareapprenticeship.libsyn.com/rss Our panel (composed of Toby Trip...

In the summer of 2004 I did an apprenticeship of sorts at a place called Object Mentor.  At the time “Uncle” Bob Martin and his son Micah Martin were in leadership positions at the company and I somehow convinced them to let me work for free over the summer in exchange for teaching me software development. It wasn’t a very structured program, nothing like what Micah would later put together for 8th Light , but I was a pretty motivated learner.  I also had the advantage of coming from a teaching background so I knew how to learn. All this has been covered in daily detail, if you'd like to read more. After ten years of software experience I’m becoming a mentor to an apprentice and documenting the experience via podcast.  Backstop Solutions has graciously allowed me to pay our apprentice (the same rate we pay interns) as he is doing real work on a daily basis in addition to outside learning experiences.  From 9-5 he will be working on production code with 100% supe...

The number of software luminaries who sing the praises of “ Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs ” (referred to as SICP) is such a long list that you might think only a crazy person would take issue with it. However, to ignore SICP’s problems and continue to blindly recommend it seems just as crazy. SICP was the textbook for MIT’s introductory programming class and was a bit of a departure from other into to computer science textbooks at the time.  Wikipedia sums it up nicely:  “Before SICP, the introductory courses were almost always filled with learning the details of some programming language, while SICP focuses on finding general patterns from specific problems and building software tools that embody each pattern.”  Which sounds awesome, but does essentially say that abstract principles will be introduced before the nuts and bolts of a language.  If you think about that for a minute, you may see where the problems will be. When I was training to be a...

My last commit to MetricFu was March 2...  of 2011.  So. much. shame. Since I am throwing in the towel and handing over leadership (perhaps to you), I thought I should explain why I've been such a terrible maintainer and why I'm walking away. Reasons: 1). MetricFu is a mess.  At some point, with all the submissions coming in, the architecture and testing got away from me.  Now it's pretty depressing to see crap code quality in an app that is supposed to be about good code quality.  I can not overstate how embarrassing and frustrating this is – mostly because it's my fault (I let in things I shouldn't have. Stupid feature blindness). 2). In 2008, when I created MetricFu, I was fascinated by metrics and now I'm not because I don't need the tools to see the problems anymore.  Metrics made me better but now I'm leaving them behind:  Selfish. 3). I'm not a consultant at the moment so the exploratory nature of MetricFu isn't very useful t...

We've been having some Oracle deadlock issues that have been hard to reproduce locally. After a lot of investigation and solving of important problems that happened not to be THE problem we figured out that while we've been pretty good creating integrity constraints in the database we have not been very good about making sure that every foreign key has a corresponding index. And that can lead to problems. So we had a situation were our documents table had a foreign key on the accounts table that was not indexed. So updating an account row lead to a whole table lock on documents (instead of just a row lock which would have happened if there was an index) and that was very bad when we had two separate processes where one was doing a bunch of accounts stuff and the other was doing a lot of documents stuff. Deadlocks for everyone! The sad thing is that if we had just drank the Rails cool-aid about having no integrity constraints in the db we would have been fine but we got into ...

Last day of Ruby Kaigi! Sad to see it go, it's been a great conference. As per usual Tweets are in bulleted italics and the rest is after the fact commentary. First I've got to show you the commemorative fans they were handing out: It's Matz and... Someone else (sorry if it's obvious - I don't know). And of course they are programing in the bath. BigDecimal: You can handle numbers as large as can fit into memory as opposed to the IEEE double #rubykaigi BigMath is the Math module for BigDecimal #rubykaigi Lots of different rounding modes in BigDecimal #rubykaigi BigDecimal.mode is global per process - not thread safe #rubykaigi So BigDecimal is Fiber unsafe #rubykaigi Bummer. .@mrkn implemented a solution storing mode in thread local #rubykaigi Oh good. Wait, is that in 1.9.2 or trunk. I'd have to be in 1.9.2 right? To the Google! ... Yep, seems like it made it in: http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/3285 You can now change modes in a block (added to trunk...