September 2006 - Posts
I recently ran across the article A Good Programmer is a Lazy Programmer and it reminded me of the my high school programming teacher's favorite quote: "Be Smart & Lazy". More on that in a minute, but first a brief detour down memory lane.
We had an amazing programmer department & Mr. Kirkwood was an amazing teacher. Ok, he was a bit kooky too, but that kept things interesting. He taught us sort algorithms (bubble, insertion, merge, matrix, etc.), data structures (linked lists, doubly linked lists, trees, etc.), the C programming langange, and even the Big O Notation. And this was in high school! This foundation definitely got me started on the right foot.
Alright, back to the principle. The key to the principle is grasping both pieces-- Smart and Lazy. I've met plenty of programmers that were lazy. These are the kind who just cut and paste code over and over. Or they download and quickly use snippets of code off the Internet without understanding them. This just leads to inefficient, difficult to maintain code. So, the key is to be both smart and lazy. Be smart and look for the patterns in your code and create reusable libraries. And the laziness will kick in when you're able to deliver solutions with less work. I think build servers & unit testing fall into this principle too. It may not seem like you're being lazy when you spend more time up front writing tests and configuring servers, but when you have an automated build system that tests your code for you after every check in -- then you'll feel the rewards of being Smart & Lazy.
IronPython has been receiving lots of attention lately...as well it should! It showcases what a great platform .NET has become for languages for all kinds. But IronPython isn't the only language in town...take a look at my
.NET languages page. It has grown to over
100 projects with nearly every language you can think of...and many you've probably never heard of. Thanks to everyone who has contributed links and corrections.
Well, it should be a lot eaiser than this, but Joel Ward figured out how to do it.
http://joelsef.blogspot.com/2006/05/recently-updated-documents-in.html
Maybe there will be an eaiser way in SharePoint 2007.
Recently I needed to put the change log from our subversion repository online. Luckily, Martin Pittenauer put together a great XSLT script that turns the XML produced by the SVN Log command into an RSS feed. It utilizes eXSLT so you'll need to use a compatible XSLT tranform tool.
Step 1) Download the XSLT from Martin Pittenauer:
See his blog post for details http://codingmonkeys.de/map/log/articles/2003/10/07/svnlog-xslt
Step 2) Modify XSLT
Change the description, copyright, etc. in the XSLT to match your project
Step 3) Create script to pull log from XML and convert to RSS:
Step 4) Schedule it using Windows Task Scheduler or CRON
This will publish your recent changes out to the feed. It can then be viewed by IE7 or another RSS reader.
NOTE: You can pull recent changes on a branch, etc. by changing the URL passed to the svn log command.
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