This is a lesson I should have learned. It comes back to bite me and my coworkers ever so often. Running a script to update data without test is always quick and dirty. SSIS is a wonderful tool, but there are fundamental flaws to this tool as it’s really hard to test SSIS packages. The beauty of using ruby or some other language (powershell, python, et.c.) is that you can write tests for the code. So, when you’re doing yourself the favor of using ruby, write tests!

Reading source code is hard. One way of dealing with this is rewriting what is not understood. This can help focus on some parts of the code, but can be detrimental since it’s easy to overlook functionality in files that are not touched or files that look too complex (throwing away functionality). One way of doing this is to create a fork to rewrite one, in order to be able to throw away the changes made essentially to read the code. <div> </div> It's usually harder to read code than to write it. Trying [...]

I was thinking about how nice you have it in some languages where you can do a case statement for types. Thing is, we have a lot of compiler goodness in C# already. By being explicit about the type and using type inference we can have a generic Case statement of a maximum length (depends on how many if else you think are ok to add). I find it pretty sweet to write code like this:<blockquote class="tr_bq"> TypeMatch.Case(exception,   (GnarlyType e) => { HandleGnarly(e); },   (FuncyType e1) => { HandleFunky([...]

Some times you encounter a class that implements IEnumerator without any IEnumerable implementation. To preserve the spirit of the enumerator (basically a cursor) we can just add an extension method that yields the elements. But most of the time it’s simply to add a “.Cast()" if it is IEnumerable without the extra type information.<div style="clear: both;"></div>

As a programmer it is easy to adopt a view of the world in light of our experience. The workings of the world starts to look as something out of the matrix. This has some funny consequences: While listening to a person reasoning about the complicated events today from the point of view of famous thinkers; You can get the feeling of hearing a formalized thought pattern executed by a very complex machine. This sort of meta thinking naturally can be attributed to the formalization of execution that you work w[...]