Simon Baynes

G'day:
Just very quickly. My mate / colleague Simon finished at HostelBookers.com today, and moved on to a new position. It's not for me to share the details, but it sounds like a really good gig, and Simon's a good fit for it.

Simon was the Technical Architect at HostelBookers.com, and was responsible for hiring me. I did not report to him directly, but we worked reasonably closely on various projects over the last almost four years.

My readers doing my work for me

G'day:
Sometimes the comments on this blog are better that the articles themselves. I've elevated one of Sean's comments to a full "guest" article a while back: "An Architect's View: Sean's feedback on my recent article about ColdFusion interfaces", and over the weekend my mate Simon put his oar in on one of my recent Unit Testing / TDD articles to feedback some useful info to one of my other regular commenters, Bruce. What Simon says is very true, and something I think all devs should bear in mind. It's got nothing to do with testing or TDD, but is all about how we ought to be approaching our work, as professionals. Simon's comment:

Unit Testing / TDD - initial rhetoric

G'day:
I was talking to a mate/colleague the other day @ CFCamp, and the topic of unit tests came around, and that they... well... didn't do any. They were aware this was not good, but had a sorta mental block of how to get going with TDD and the whole idea of test-first code-second. I had to admit I only started doing unit testing in my current role, and I have our lead architect, Simon Baynes to thank for this. For the preceding decade or so of my development career my approach to testing was the standard cowboy approach of if something didn't seem to break it was probably OK. A lot of people take this approach. It's a shit approach. Don't do it.

In my own defence (it's a lame defence, I hasten to add), I can explain away my lack of unit testing practice for the first few years of my career as I was one of these typical CFML developers who wasn't aware of the wider industry around me, so having not thought to investigate stuff like good coding practices and to check how other people did stuff. Also when new to dev I was in a very jack-the-lad cowboy-ish environment in which doing a decent job of anything was shunned in favour of doing the quickest job possible. Not ideal.

However ignorance is not a defence, and certainly for a few years after my start I was well aware of unit testing as a concept, but never really looked into it. I was like "yeah, I know I should look at this stuff, but it'll just end up meaning I have to write a whole lot of boring test code, and who wants to do that?" This is a very immature, lacking-in-self-disciple attitude, which I now regret.

1

G'day:
I'm a bit late with this as it happened a week or so ago, but I just noticed I've been prattling away on this blog for a year now.

Apropos of nothing, here's some mostly useless information about this blog.

• I've "published" 322 articles; I've got 14 in progress (some of the "in progress" is just a title and an idea).
• That's an accumulation of approximately 350000 words (!!).
• I've had almost 2000 comments! Crikey, that comes as a surprise.
• According to Google Analytics (which I installed about a week after I started), I've had 25000 people visit the blog.
• My busiest day was Mon 8 April this year. That day I knocked out four articles, which helps:
  • A reader asks me: "CF10 for a new start up?". Answer: no
  • Moving House... Mango Blog? (note that I have not moved it yet... I'm still on Blogspot)
  • Now with comments on the mobile version
  • onApplicationStart() will run whilst onApplicationEnd() is still underway
• The most viewed article - by far - is the article my mate Chris wrote on his adventures getting Railo working on his Raspberry Pi! I'm not proud, so I've had a bit of a laugh with him about that. I should get him to write more stuff. The next four most popular were:
  • Your IDE of choice: survey results
  • I've picked a framework. Well: you've picked it for me (UPDATED)
  • Arrays in ColdFusion (part 2)
  • Sean said that Nick said that Fusion Authority said...
•  However the most +1`ed article was one of my own: What do I want to see in ColdFusion 11?
• The most commented-on article (with 41 comments) is - surprisingly - the very non-controversial "Unexpectedly performance differences between listFind() and arrayFind() in ColdFusion"; second to that have 40 comments, and was "Which CFML-oriented blogs do you read?"
• In January this year (so after the first six months), I was averaging 94 unique visitors per day; Over the most recent six months, it's about 150 per day. So not a huge amount of traffic still, but at least it's something. And it's generally building week by week, so that's a positive sign.

I said in one of my earlier articles that I've learned more about ColdFusion since I started this blog than I had in the preceding few years. This continues to be the case, and I've learned a bunch of good stuff about Application.cfc, ColdFusion regexes, JSON (grumble), REST, interfaces (in general, as well as ColdFusion's inplementation of them), and various other odds 'n' sods. Even some web sockets stuff, whilst troubleshooting that security issue from a coupla weeks back. I've also used Railo a lot more, and had a look at Coldbox. Beyond ColdFusion I've also started dabbling with PHP and Ruby. It's been cool! I hope some of it was useful to you, or at least slightly interesting. Or killed some time whilst you tried to decipher what I was wittering on about.

To close, I'd like to say special thanks to a few people whose participation in this blog has been helpful, interesting or thought-provoking. In no particular order, and it's certainly not an exhaustive list:

• Chris Kobrzak
• Sean Corfield
• Andrew Myers
• Bruce Kirkpatrick
• Brad Wood
• Andrew Scott
• Adam Tuttle
• Ray Camden
• Gavin Pickin
• Jay Cunnington
• Simon Baynes
• Duncan Cumming
• Brian Sadler

There's been a bunch of great input / correction / sanity-checking / bullshit-detection done by a heap of other people too.  Cheers to everyone who's participated here.

And now on to year 2...

--
Adam

No, the ++ operators are not thread safe

G'day:
My lunch break is running out (by about -10min so far ;-), so this will be quick.

In my last article I got bitten on the bum by weird behaviour of the prefix increment operator (ie: ++myVar), in that two simultaneous calls to it would cause the increment to skip.

Doing some research (basically asking my colleague Simon) , I discovered that - no - these operators are not thread safe. This is good to know.

When functions do too much, and how to get them to do more

G'day:
After soliciting more UDFs for CFLib a while ago, I've been dead slack at processing the inbound queue, and fixing some bugs people have found. Sorry about that. I started playing catch-up at lunchtime today: you might have noticed a coupla bugfixes bubbling through on Twitter if you follow the @cfbloggers feed.

RSS feeds again

G'day:
I blame Simon for this post ;-)

OK, so I've turned the full feeds back on, but I've made a coupla smaller feeds as well.  Here're the details (also to be found on the right-hand side bar):

• Default feed
• Last ten articles (full)
• Last ten articles (summary)

The default feed is the one provided by BlogSpot by default, which lists the last n articles (I didn't count how many), and provides the full text.

The other two are provided by Feedburner, and just give the last ten full articles, or the first 500 chars of those articles, respectively.

I hope this covers all the bases for everyone (when I say "everyone" that's bigging-up the half dozen people who read this thing ;-)

I'll have a proper article up at some stage later today.  I meant to write something decent yesterday, but got bogged down on the Railo forums all afternoon, "politely discussing" [cough] some vagaries of Railo I'd found. This was basically the follow-up from that previous article I wrote about the member function methods Railo has for arrays (arrayFindAll(), arrayReverse() (RAILO-2070), and arraySort() (RAILO-2069: already fixed!)), and some back and forth on Railo's <cfdump>.  Inspiring stuff.

But first I need some breakfast (am not working today).

Righto.

--
Adam