Brian Hartsock's Blog

Ever since I purchased my house a year ago, I have been trying to create the perfect office. After lots of thinking, a little bit of work, and a few trips to Ikea, I have finished my journey (for now). I wanted to write a few short posts that take you through the creation of the office. My goals for the office were pretty simple. Support lots of equipment (I use 3 computers in a given day) No wires Fung sei (my translation means clean and simple) Over the next few weeks, I will post on how I got there. »

Here is an excerpt from my team’s chat room today: (4:31:42 PM) brian.hartsock: i saw a good blog post on how to reuse moq verification steps somewhere (4:31:43 PM) brian.hartsock: http://blog.brianhartsock.com/2009/09/01/using-extension-methods-to-clean-up-mocks-moq/ (4:31:45 PM) brian.hartsock: oh there it is :) (4:34:39 PM) kendall: I don’t know…is self-promotion allowed in the group chat room? ;-) (4:37:40 PM) kevin: I promote myself to Supreme Ruler. (4:40:46 PM) jake: as long as you don’t »

A long time ago when I was a team lead, we were in a planning session and I made up the rule of doubling. Jokingly, I said we should just double the estimates of all our developers (at the time estimates were in hours or days, not story points). The reason behind it was the fact that doubling would make the outcome more realistic, as I knew the developers were vastly underestimating tasks. »

Akismet - Defactor spam comment blocker. All in one SEO - Not really for sure why I use it, hope it generates more traffic? Broken Link Checker - Spits out all the broken links across your entire wordpress site. FancyBox - Makes images look o-so-pretty. Feedburner Feedsmith - Nice and easy integration with feedburner. Google Analytics Google XML Sitemap - Generates a pretty XML sitemap for search engines to use »

I spent the last few weeks working on a Rails project. Although there was a lot to learn, I feel as though I have a decent understanding of Ruby and Rails at this point. I am by no means an expert, but I can do the basics without googling. I figured I would document my thoughts on what every developer should learn from the Rails framework. Gems - Having a package manager to to handle dependencies rocks. »

Package management has been on my mind for months as one of the greatest short comings in .NET. If you spend two hours using Ruby and gems, you realize how much easier it is than finding the appropriate .NET assemblies to use. It also promotes using open source libraries, instead of re-inventing the wheel. nu aims to provide this for .NET. I checked it out tonight. Here is my experience. First step is to install it, and ruby is the only pre-req. »

Data driving ruby tests with meta-programming is one of the more elegant examples of meta-programming in my opinion. Understanding that class definitions are active, and you can add methods in a loop is very powerful. class LocationTest < ActiveSupport::TestCase def setup @location = Location.new end {:empty => '', :nil => nil}.each do |key, value| test "address can't be " + key do @location.address = value assert !@location.valid? end end end NUnit has the ability to do the same thing, but attributes and reflection just aren’t as elegant. »

MSBuild.aspx) is a very powerful build tool. Unfortunately, in my experience, I have seen it utilized very little. Instead, developers rely entirely on Visual Studio for the build, which is a mistake. I think there are a couple reasons for this: Modifying the build feels like you are mucking in the internals of Visual Studio There is no convention based approaches for how to handle custom bulid targets Now, you could go the way of NAnt, and have complete independence from Visual Studio. »

Synergy+ is most easily described as a software KVM. In reality, it is much more than that. It is more like having multiple monitors, except each monitor is actually attached to its own computer. Synergy+ is a fork of the original project, which hasn’t been updated since 2006. Enough with the chit-chat, lets get it up and running on Windows in no time. Install Install - Done. Configure - Server side This is the confusing part. »

Ok, here is a list of software I have installed. It is a pretty good list for only a few days with the machine. Note this is for home, not for work. Otherwise the list would be way different. Eclipse - Android and Java tinkering Firefox - To test, not to use. Chrome - Best browser out there, I promise! JungleDisk Desktop - Backups and synchronization are a must for any computer. »