I think Bigwig has become my favourite bit of code that I’ve ever worked on.
Before Bigwig, it was Object Factory, before that it was a Delphi class that I used to create tree-structured data (imaginatively called TNode).
Bigwig’s doesn’t have a test suite and it’s not even my code – it was [...]

I’ve just done a quick post at the Brightbox blog detailing their use of free and open source software and showing some of the free Brightbox projects.
In particular, Warren & Bigwig and Object Factory could be of use to many people and are probably worth a look.

Any web-developer Rubyist knows about models, views and controllers. The MVC paradigm is embedded in the structure of Rails and Merb and encouraged by Ramaze and Sinatra. If you’re a Mac developer or an iPhone bod then MVC is common practice there as well. Same goes for Sproutcore and even Microsoft is [...]

I’m sure you’ve all heard the Rails 3 announcement. When I first found out my initial reaction was “fuck me“. But shortly after I was filled with a feeling of dread and general unease. And I didn’t know why ….
Firstly, a bit of history.
I first tried programming on a Commodore [...]

I’ve written up a new post at the Brightbox blog detailing how we are using RSpec and Cucumber to build acceptance tests for the next generation Brightbox systems.

It’s an unfortunate fact that many Open Source projects have documentation that is sadly lacking. A case in point is GNU Smalltalk.
Smalltalk is one of my favourite languages but a decent Smalltalk implementation that fits with your native window manager is hard to find. The point of GNU Smalltalk is that [...]

y first adventure in source control was many years ago. It was my first proper job and I was the sole developer in a tiny company. To keep the source code safe, it was all stored on a network share, and the file server was backed up at least once a day. [...]

Two (related) thoughts on “The Specification is the Documentation“.
One of the things that I like to do, when developing, is to start with a sketch (you know, with 95g/m2 paper and a 6B pencil) of how the UI will look. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, it helps communications with the client [...]

In a former life I used to write “functional specifications”. These were long, dense, hard-to-read documents that detailed what an application (not yet written) was supposed to do. I would spend (literally) weeks typing these things up, the customer would read it, think they understand and I would quote them based upon the document. [...]

One of the great advantages of using mock objects to test and specify your objects is that you concentrate solely on the thing you are testing.  
If you weren’t using mocks to tests that a controller re-shows the “new” form if given an invalid object, you would do post :create, :model => { … } where [...]