Tab completion in IRB. Unfortunately, Ruby doesn’t have auto-completion, so this feature is entirely impossible inspite of what the screencast shows, or my attempts to successfully use it. Dang. (Via Ruby Inside)
So we solved the syntactic coupling problem… but as Rockford Lhotka eloquently says in Semantic coupling: the elephant in the SOA room, we still have a coupling problem: “I would hope it does all these things, but very few of us would be willing to blindly assume it does them. And so we are forced to treat ship-an-order as something other than a black box. At best it is gray, but probably downright clear. We’ll require that the service’s actual behaviors be documented. And then we’ll fill in the gaps for what it does not provide, or doesn’t provide in a way we like.â€
Personally, I don’t think coupling is something we can avoid, or for that matter want to avoid. Coupling is good because it gets the job done. It’s the barriers we want to drop, like being dependent on a platform, language, library or vendor. We want to move up the abstraction layers to more interesting problems, and more beneficial couplings. But that doesn’t sound like a consultant-made silver bullet, does it? It just sounds like more hard work, more tough decisions, more thinking and engineering. Guess what? That’s software.
RESTful Rails cheatsheet. Because even simple things are easy to forget.
Buy now, pay later. James Shore on when to get into technical debt: “There’s a flip side to technical debt, though. A savvy team can use technical debt as a tool to accomplish more than they otherwise would. Be careful, though: it’s sort of like handling sensitive explosives.â€
Java Class Loaders are …
a) Best invention since sliced bread, and I’m allergic to flour.
b) The only way to build big, scalable system and impress your co-workers.
c) The only thing between me and working code.
d) You lost me at “classâ€.