Irrelevant musings about software development

Wednesday, I posted my musing on becoming more grounded as a developer. Yesterday, I tried in ernest to put my reflections into action.

I exercised my code from every angle I could think of, and found a bunch of minor nits. I fixed and refactored the code until I had something I was truly proud of. The problem is, I became so focused on the details that I forgot about a main scenario.

Given the state of my laptop, it would have been a pain, but not painful to test this scenario. All and all, I can say that I'm pleased with my performance yesterday, and will try in earnest to keep this up going forward.

I'm trying out blog editing software on my Mac Mini. So far, I've used MarsEdit and Ecto. I'm honestly not very impressed with either of them. MarsEdit doesn't support (that I've found) rich text editing from within its editor. It only supports raw HTML editing, but will shell out to other editors to do the rich text editing.

Ecto, took me quite a few tries to find a good link to download it. When I finally got it downloaded, isn't to terrible. The UI isn't very clean IMHO. Its interface for adding links is sub-par, and NOT discoverable. At least it supports a rich text editor out of the box.

I wish Microsoft would make a version of Windows Live Writer for the Mac :)

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In the current version of the software we are working on, I've become very complacent as a developer. I've written my code, and then been done with it. I've tested what I've written. But after seeing the number of issues that have arisen, I think I can say I haven't really tested my code.

Its a humbling feeling, this self-realiziation I've come to. But the bigger and better question is what am I going to do moving forward? I'm going to allow this to make me more humble.

I need to put on my tester hat more. I need to find that glee and excitement I had long ago when I would break other peoples code and apply that to my own work. I need to be more pessimistic regarding what might fail; not optimistic about everything going right.

I also need to take a page out of my friend Aaron's book, and realize that its really a personal failure on my part if a defect with my code makes it out of development. If testing finds a defect with my stuff, then in my opinion, I have failed as a developer. But, it doesn't make me a failure as a person, or as a developer. But it does mean that I need to redouble my efforts to ensure that it doesn't happen again.