Samuel Taggart
The official "Architect of Adventure". I help teams create healthy, human-centered software development processes.
Ego Is The Enemy And The Obstacle Is The Way
As I wrote in a previous post about philosophy and coding I was not always a big fan of philosophy. I viewed it as an academic pursuit, a bunch of eggheads sitting around thinking about thinking. I never saw the practical value. That is until a read a pair of
Automate the Boring Stuff With Python
* NI recently added Python Integration to both LabVIEW and TestStand.
* Danielle Jobe’s presentation at GDevCon last year and her hands-on at NI week this year were both on integrating LabVIEW and Python.
* I had a job this year where there was potential for more work to be done but
Managing Dependencies with DQMH Messages
In one of his talks, Uncle Bob describes Software Engineering as the art of managing dependencies. This is something that a lot of new programmers have difficulty with. I often run into code written by beginners (and some not-so-beginnners) that has lots of circular dependencies. I also see a lot
Data And Goliath
Nothing is private on the internet. Most of us understand this idea intellectually. We realize that we are being surveilled at some level, but most of us do not grasp the depth and breadth of that surveillance and what exactly it is used for and the implications. Bruce Schneier does
Philosophy and Coding
“Is your value system producing the results you want?”
My last post touched a little bit on philosophy. It talked about changing the way we think about unit testing. If you have watched my presentations on Refactoring or TDD, you’ll notice they also talk about changing the way we
Stop Asking Permission To Do The Right Thing
I was originally going to title this post “A Business Case for Unit Testing”. I was going to talk about how it helps you to find bugs early, spend less time debugging, and all the other benefits I have mentioned in my previous posts. I intended it as a cheat
December 2019 Webinar
Refactoring
December 11 11:00am MT
I need to add a feature but it is too hard.
Refactoring can help! Refactoring is the art of taking existing code and waking it easier to understand and modify without actually changing it’s behavior. Why? Friction. Code is read more often than
Insta Coverage
I first heard about InstaCoverage at NI Week 2018. I was part of a panel discussing Unit Testing. Peter Bokor gave a brief presentation right before the panel started on a new unit testing tool IncQuiry Labs had created called InstaCoverage. He really emphasized the code coverage calculation. This is
GDevCon #2 Videos
The GDevCon #2 Videos are now available. You can access the entire playlist here. We are proud to have sponsored an event that produces such great content!
All of the presentations were great and worth watching, but here are some of my favorites.
* Rebar – Ben Leedom introduced a new programming
Reusing Tests for Built Code
As I have been doing more and more Unit Testing and Continuous Integration, I have often wondered about automating testing of built code. There are promising tools out there for testing built Win32 apps, such as WinAppDriver. There is also Selenium for testing webapps, so if you are into the
Outliers
I’ve had several very interesting conversations lately. I had a great conversation with Allen, Shane, Danielle, and Oli after GDevCon2. I had another fascinating conversation with Fab and few others after the CLA Summit. Most recently I had a conversation after Social Media Day Denver.
All these conversations had
