Steve Freeman

Just in case we still have to make the point:

There’s certainly evidence that that “exploratory” approach to computing is an important job skill. Beth Simon and Andy Begel’s recent series of papers on their study of new hires at Microsoft show that the first year of work is mostly spent understanding existing code, not [...]

I picked up the New Scientist for my in-flight reading on the way to JavaZone and came across a fascinating article.

For those who don’t have a subscription, it turns out that willpower is a limited resource, like exercising a muscle. Different people have different limits, but when they’ve used it up they need time to [...]

So, by one reading of Roy’s posting, I appear to have become the reactionary voice of TDD, a sort of technical William F. Buckley, which is not something I aspire to.

The question is how to get all those developers to do TDD when, apparently, they don’t know the basics of software design. It seems the [...]

There’s a common pattern where an object is constructed with a Context object that carries all the dependencies the new object might need. It’s often used, for example, with classes that package up domain behaviour based on lower-level services, something like this:

public class PriceReconciler {
private final Context context;

public PriceReconciler(Context context) {
[...]

I’m speaking at JavaZone in Oslo, on September 17th. I was so impressed last year that I managed to get back in. The topic will be Listening to Test Smells, which Nat and I have been raising for a while.

I’ll only be there until mid-afternoon Wednesday, so get in touch early if you want to [...]

I’ll be travelling for personal reasons to Beijing, Shanghai, Seoul, and Hong Kong in late October.

I’ve already been making enquiries, so if you’re interested in getting together then please drop me a line.