I inherited a project written using Actor Framework recently. I started to do a little refactoring to make it easier to add some of the changes I needed to make, following Kent Beck’s idea of “First make the change easy, then make the easy change.”

What is in a name?

They say...

Oh My ZSH

If you follow this blog, you will know that I am a huge fan of the Maintainable podcast by Robby Russell. It contains lots of great information about working with Legacy Code and how to write code so that you avoid a lot of the issues with Legacy Code.

Robby is also the...

I have been working on putting together some prerecorded online classes. I have been using Camtasia and Snagit a lot lately, so I thought I would do a quick writeup on them. I first discovered these tools when doing some videos for NI. That is what they had recommended for doing screen captures....

I recently posted a book review for a book about learning Docker. I immediately got some feedback that I did not do a great job of explaining exactly what Docker is. This post is going to be a brief explanation of exactly what Docker is and particularly how it compares to virtual machines.

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Git is a great source code control tool, but it is not known for being user friendly. It’s actually a shame. The way in which git stores and references content is incredibly elegant, but it’s UI seems more of an afterthought. The command structure is not at all consistent and some...

Our TDMS Headers has officially been published to the NI Tools Network. It makes it easier to read and write cluster of data as properties for tdms files. Simply pass it a cluster and it does the rest.

You may have heard of Gitflow. It was first proposed here nearly 10 years ago. If you are like me, when I first saw it, I was a little overwhelmed. I certainly got the idea of making use of git’s powerful...

Caraya is a popular Unit Testing solution from JKI. Compared to JKI VI Tester, Caraya seems to be newer and better supported. In fact while conducting this review I found a small bug. I reported it and it was fixed within 24 hours.

The Caraya paradigm is different from the xUnit paradigm. It is...

I first heard about InstaCoverage at NI Week 2018. I was part of a panel discussing Unit Testing. Peter Bokor gave a brief presentation right before the panel started on a new unit testing tool IncQuiry Labs had created called InstaCoverage. He really emphasized the code coverage...

I recently did a review of JKI VI Tester. While it is my goto unit testing tool, there are several issues with it:

• You have to be an admin to install it.
• It adds a ton of dependencies to your project.
• If you have a project that has tests in it and you open it on a computer without VI Tester...

If you have been following my posts, you will know that I am a big fan of JKI VITester. It is my goto Unit Tester. Why? Mostly because it is an implementation of xUnitStyle testing, which means that I can easily use all of the great patterns outlined in xUnit Test Patterns and all of the other...

Allen Smith and I have been working on a side project we called Events for UI Actor Indicators for a couple months (we’ve both been busy lately).  It started with a discussion at a CLA summit in Austin.  That prompted Allen to come up with an idea and then at the European CLA...