Archives for cmountford

Dreaming in Code – Book Review

Having just finished this book that somehow appeared in the Atlassian developer library, I thought I'd review it and comment on some of the issues it raises from my perspective as a software developer. Software is Hard in the words of legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth. Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code is an insightful exploration of why. Following old school software mogul Mitch Kapor and his band of merry developers, Rosenberg lives in the muddy trenches of a real software project. His

Continue reading »

Comments (1)

Somebody Didn't Want Me To Func Test This

For much of this week I have been taken from my bug fixing work to drag a functional test kicking and screaming across the fine line that separates working from broken. This test was to ensure that JIRA's "Johnson" servlet filter will correctly stop incoming requests from waking up the plugin system or the micro container (picocontainer) while the system is unable to respond. Cases include while JIRA is being setup, during an import etc. JIRA returns a 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable response

Continue reading »

Comments (2)

Design Group Session 1 Went Off!

Being a good developer requires continual learning. Recently, Atlassian held the first session of Design Group. A study session on object-oriented software design, the purpose of Design Group is to remove pesky distractions like deadlines and users so we can concentrate on improving the design of the software we make. In this first session, we started with the foundations of Object Design and selected a group of less senior developers to be guinea pigs in what I hope will grow into an extensive training

Continue reading »

Comments (0)

Regular Expression Recipe of the Day*

It sounds easy enough. How do you use regular expressions to match URLs from anywhere except mycompany.com? If you know a little about regular expressions you will confidently roll up your sleeves and start typing. You may soon discover it's harder than it looks. I did. The use case is pretty simple. In JIRA administrators can specify regular expressions to exclude URLs from acceptable trackbacks. So a support request came to me and the guy was wondering what he was missing. He just wanted to match

Continue reading »

Comments (8)

Codegeist Meetup #1 vs SyXPAC

OK I'm bitter. I admit it. If only I'd started at Atlassian a few months later I would have been eligible to enter the Codegeist Plugin Coding Competition. No kilobucks for me. So when I heard about the Sydney Codegeist Meetup, I realised an opportunity to channel my bitterness into forcing unsuspecting attendees to hear my bizarre plugin ideas. The fact that the meetup incorporated the SyXPAC meeting meant that I could get my weekly dose of agile atmosbeer at the same time. I was pretty surprised

Continue reading »

Comments (0)