Last week I had the week off, so me and my girlfriend decided to spend one night somewhere special. When we were looking we saw some amazing places that you can stay in, from a lighthouse to a wine barrel. From a plane to a castle. We ended up sleeping in a castle: Kasteel Hattem. […]
A while ago I was faced with an interesting challenge: I was busy introducing dependency injection into an existing system. Almost every method call inside this system was a static call, so every class was hard coded to their dependencies. But, I might be going a little bit too fast here. What is dependency injection? […]
A true software engineer wants to be able to release at any time with any application. An unexpected problem can require a hotfix, so you want to be ready for it. When maintaining more then ten, twenty or maybe even thirty applications, this becomes a problem. What is a good strategy for keeping software releasable? […]
Last monday I decided to upgrade some of the systems that I maintain to their latest version. When doing so I saw that there was a new WordPress version released: 3.6. The release is codenamed Oscar, and it’s now rolled out on this website, and on odetocooking.com as well. As a user, you’ll notice no […]
A couple of weeks ago I spent a weekend in a rented cottage in Putten. The main reason for heading there was the annual beach pull, a bunch of tuned tractors pulling too much weight. All in all it was a very nice weekend. When we were at the reception I saw the Dutch and […]
One of the main advantages of developing with scriptable tooling is that they sometimes give you nice presents. While doing some research for a future article, I came across a composer post-checkout hook. The picture below displays very nicely how this works. When you change branches there is a chance that you have different dependencies, […]
There are a lot of legacy applications out there without unit-tests. It would be very nice to have them, especially when you’re asked to fix a bug there. So, how can you start unit testing legacy applications? Lets start with a simple mantra. Test one unit at a time. These are unit-tests after all. There […]
A lot of nice stuff is happening in the PHP ecosystem right now. In this case I’m not talking about the PHP 5.5 RC3 that was released lately, since that will take a bit more time to be released, let alone be available for the world to use. I’m talking about the Symfony 2.3 release, […]
Yesterday I was invited with a colleague to join the Agile event 7 at the Arrows Group. The speakers were very interesting, Maarten Hoppen and Jeff Sutherland. Jeff Sutherland is one of the inventors of scrum, so I was eager to go. For the people that think he’s that means he’s the inventor of this… […]
Yesterday I bought the Humble Indie Bundle 8. The game that triggered this was Awesomenauts, it’s a fast paced DOTA game (with a lousy story, of course). Anyway, a video will explain this more clearly. Playing Awesomenauts feels like playing Fat Princess. The trailer makes it seem a bit shallow, but there are a lot […]