A Decade of Lightning Talks with Programming One-Liners

Note: This blog post follows the modern recipe style – a load of unimportant background history before presenting the real content. So, just hit page-down a few times if that’s what you came here for, I won’t be offended.

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Just over 10 years ago, fellow ACCU member Jez Higgins replied to another one of my programming one-liners on Twitter with a flippant remark that I probably had enough material now for an entire conference talk…

Lightning Talks

The ACCU conference generally hosts 90 minute talks. Of course, there was no way anybody would sit through that length of session, even if I had the relevant amount of “quality” programming puns, and if the conference committee were crazy enough to accept it as a serious proposal.

However, another popular feature of the ACCU conference were the lightning talks, which were only 5 minutes long and held at the end of each day. The barrier to entry there was considerably lower too as they could cover virtually any topic. Also, I’d already given a few of these in the past, all with programming related humour being the general theme, e.g.

2010: Recycle Bin 101 – a Room 101 affair featuring some of Microsoft’s tools which refused to die gracefully back then, such as Visual C++ 6, Visual SourceSafe, and IE 6.

2012: Not Only, But Also – a riff on the #NOSQL, and #NOESTIMATES movements featuring my own variation: #NOSHIT.

2014: The Art of Code – a selection of code snippets framed as art, along with humorous titles. (This was inspired by Chopin’s Waterloo at the Pompidou Centre in Paris.)

2014: Requiem for Windows XP – a recital of Rutger Hauer’s final words in Bladerunner followed by the shutdown screen for Windows XP to mark its demise by Microsoft as it had finally reached its official end of life.

An Actual Comedy Routine

With Jez’s tweet in mind I decided that for 2015 I would go for a more formal stand-up comedy routine and read out what I hoped were some of my “best” and most appropriate puns for the ACCU conference demographic, which are typically highly technical programmers, largely from the C++ community, and mostly of a certain “vintage”. With the rise of the agile movement in full swing at the time, “The Daily Stand-Up” seemed like the perfect play on words to use for the title. The set of 30 or so puns were delivered in a deadpan style to an audience of 300+ attendees, and the reaction was such that I considered it a success and definitely worthy of further attempts in the future.

Over subsequent years I “performed” similar routines at Agile of the Beach, the Equal Experts Christmas Party, Agile in the City Birmingham, NorDevCon, my Spektrix leaving do, and most recently, the D language conference. While they were mostly only an occasional gig or two, the lightning talks at the ACCU conference became a more regular fixture (aside from the Covid years when it wasn’t run / was purely online).

10 Years Later

And so here I am, a decade later, at the ACCU 2025 conference with another mixture of programming puns which features some old favourites, more recent material, and even some as-yet-unpublished (i.e. not tweeted, yet) material. So, if you missed out on the “live performance”, or are simply a glutton for punishment, then you can relive the experience (groans and winces entirely optional) by reading these to yourself. Enjoy!?

“The background AI in my text editor just asked me: are they paying you to write this crap? I thought that was a bit harsh, but then remembered I’d enabled dark mode.”

“I’ve started creating a typeface where each glyph is a different page from Wikipedia. It’s going to be the font of all knowledge.”

“If Bitcoin is value realized as ones and zeroes, does that effectively make it Gold Boolean?”

“Have you noticed that you never get a simple yes/no answer from people in the Tri-State area?”

“If I join the frontend channel, backend channel, database channel, and operations channel, does that make me a Full Slack Developer?”

“Now I do more working from home I like to get my kids to help me with my coding. I call it au-pair programming.”

“The trouble with pair programming in C++ is that your codebase becomes littered with .first and .second.”

“Our company is a big fan of the Pimpl Idiom. They like to hire spotty teenagers that vibe code C++.”

“I’ve always felt algorithms that round down to the nearest integer are inherently floored.”

“When first learning C++ I was given advice that I should ‘do as the ints do’. So now I make sure my code behaves slightly differently on different platforms.”

“Is a Polyglote a programmer that boasts about how many programming languages they know?”

“I once asked the Enterprise Architect if there were any non-function requirements? He said: yes, you can’t use Lisp, Haskell, F#, Elm, …”

“He clearly favoured an object oriented approach –anything we wanted to try that was different, he’d simply object.”

“I wonder if Google have postponed the next major version of their popular programming language after Dijkstra asserted that Go 2 is considered harmful?”

“I was really excited to discover Tony Hoare and Dennis Ritchie were giving a talk about two of their most influential contributions to Computer Science, but quickly became disappointed when my tickets arrived and said ‘Null & Void’.”

“People who are PRINCE certified just want to run projects like it’s 1999.”

“I recently tried to use an LLM to write some code to produce a digital certificate, but it just made a hash of it.”

“The infosec team asked us if we regularly rotate our keys. I told them: yes, we often do that by passing them through ROT-13.”

“I once debated with Alonzo, the creator of Lambda Calculous, about whether lambdas and closures were the same thing. He said ‘No!’, and that’s when I discovered there was a clear separation between Church and state.”

“We’re really regretting hiring this guy Sisyphus as a DBA, everything he does just gets rolled back!”

“In the battle between relational and document oriented databases, I think it was when SQL introduced the PIVOT function that the tables were turned.”

“We recently recruited a prompt engineer. It’s great that he’s in the office every day at 9am sharp, but then he spends the rest of the day tweaking the PS1 variable in his Bash config.”

“Have you ever noticed that off-by-one errors know no bounds?”

“The Wildlife Trust has deemed our codebase a conservation area on account of the number of bugs.”

“Our product owner asked why our acceptance tests only cover the happy path. I told him: it’s because they’re rose-tinted specs.”

“The Marketing department said that as a company we needed to be more disruptive, so I dropped the production database and deleted all the source code.”

“The other day I passed a chap typing fast and furiously to try and quit his text editor. I think he was called Vim Diesel.”

“I reckon my colleagues only find my jokes amusing when I’m in the office. At least, I think that’s what they meant when they said: you’re not remotely funny.”

Wit Limits

I’ve used the lightning talks at the last two ACCU conferences as a means of subjecting a captive audience to my dreadful array of programming / IT / geek one liners. (My previous two ACCU stand-up routines are published on this blog as “The Daily Stand-Up” and “Stand-Up and Deliver”.) This year was no different, but I wasn’t sure if I had enough “decent” new or unused material to survive the whole 5 minutes; unluckily for the audience I had...

Hence, here are the 34 one-liners I delivered under the title “Wit Limits”  [1] at this year’s ACCU conference:

“I thought it was odd when the doctor prescribed ‘programming’ to help me cope with my migraine; then I realised he said ‘codeine’.”

“These news reports of drone strikes are quite disturbing, but what I don’t understand is why we allowed delivery bots to form unions in the first place.”

“When we have chips at the seaside and I run out of ketchup I like to go round dipping them in other people’s. I call it crowd saucing.”

“The marketing department said we needed to be more disruptive, so I dropped the production database and deleted all the source code.”

“Our product doesn’t have a road map, it has a star map. Each release depends on whatever new shiny thing the developers become infatuated with next.”

“We’ve recently started using CRC cards. We now add a 32-bit checksum to each user story to stop the product owner messing with it mid-sprint.”

“Our Scrum Master is forever asking what we did yesterday, what we’re doing today, and what our impediments are. He’s a big fan of continuous interrogation.”

“I’ve always been envious of the autonomy granted to James Bond, but I guess that’s what you get when you’re M-powered.”

“Teams that refuse to do planning poker have really gone up in my estimation.”

“I’ve always felt it’s important to allow slack time in a schedule. I mean, how else are you going to keep up with all the instant messages?”

“The problem with people who are Prince certified is that they want to manage projects like it’s 1999.”

“Someone recently told me there is a new build system written entirely in F#, but I reckon it’s just Fake news.”

“I know he invented object-orientation, but was the Hexagonal Architecture also invented by Alan Key?”

“Guido seemed somewhat subdued when I asked him about how the Python enhancement process was going, so I gave him a PEP talk.”

“I recently went to see beauty and the beast; a system where the back-end was written in Python and the front-end in JavaScript.”

“I once worked at an online china shop. The CEO said we needed to move fast and break things, so I hired a bull.”

“The problem with Amazon’s Dynamo DB is that it stops working when they stop peddling it.”

“Companies that securely store my important data in offsite data centres really get my back up.”

“Vampires never use database replication as they can’t see their data in the mirror.”

“The other day a sysadmin asked me what I was using to provision hardware; he said that he was using Terraform. I replied, ‘Application Form’.”

“Whenever I provision some new hardware I like to do it in batches of a hundred. My motto is ‘infra-penny, infra-pound’.”

“Calvin Klein once offered me a modelling contract but I had to turn it down when I discovered they still used Rational Rose.”

“The other day I felt really uncomfortable after we had a massive disagreement about whether to use dashes or slashes to prefix our console app switches. I hate command line arguments.”

“I like to think of myself as a pragmatist. When the code doesn’t compile due to warnings, I just pragma them out.“

“I reckon Vim should be classified as a Class A drug on the grounds that it’s impossible to quit.”

“I’m pretty disappointed that my ZX81 based mule racing game keeps falling over. I guess I shouldn’t have called it 1K Donkey.”

“Surely to create safe self-driving cars we first have to solve the Halting Problem?”

“Never use someone that can’t write regular expressions to perform jobs interviews – they tend to be a bad judge of character.”

“When Robocop eats breakfast in the morning does he use his cereal port?”

“If you hit the Levis REST API twice, on endpoints they haven’t implemented, you’ll get a pair of 501’s.”

“The last time my wife and I tried to plait my daughter’s hair concurrently it ended in dreadlock.”

“Someone has been sending me tiny photos of my bank’s login page. I think I’m being subjected to a micro-fiching attack.”

“The last time I hired a rowing boat I could turn left and turn right, but not move forwards or backwards. I reckon it must have had exclusive oars.”

“I’ve always felt it’s important that my kids are well grounded so when they go to bed at night I attach a wire from their ear to the radiator.”

 

[1] I also used this title for an “agile” focused routine at Agile in the City: Birmingham the month before. However the less said about this performance the better...

In The Toolbox – Season Two

As I pointed out in my blog post that collates Season One of my In The Toolbox C Vu column I never intended to write more than a couple of introductory articles before handing it over for others to share their experiences. Yet now, three years later, I’m still plugging away at it and Season Three is already in the making with a couple of episodes already under my belt.

Just as before I also strongly advise you to become a member of the ACCU so you can get this, plus loads of much better content, which may or may not be published online by their respective authors. As I write this post it’s still only a measly £45 per year and is one of the last remaining printed journals about programming.

Anyway, here are links and summaries for episodes 7 through 12.

7: Feature Tracking

We have so many ideas for our products but only so many hours in the day to develop them. Sometimes all it needs is a simple text file in the repo, whilst bigger projects seem to demand an enterprise-grade solution like JIRA.

8: Taming the Inbox

Email is still the predominant means of [a]synchronous communication for many organisations and the barrage of messages need to be triaged if we stand any hope of separating the wheat from the chaff.

9: The Developer’s Sandbox

As programmers we need a safe environment in which to write and test our code, free from the distractions going on around us. When running the tests it should not be at the mercy of other developers running tests at the same time as us; first and foremost we start in isolation, if we can.

10: Dictionary & Thesaurus

One of the hardest problems in computer science is naming and yet two of the oldest tools used to solve this problem often lay dormant on the programmer’s bookshelf.

11: Finding Text

It’s a simple question: how do you find a piece of text? And yet there is a dizzying array of choices available that depend heavily on what’s accessible at the time and where and how that elusive text is stored.

12: Whiteboards

In the move to go digital the humble whiteboard has been pushed aside, which is disappointing as it’s still probably the best design tool available. It also has many other uses than drawing pictures of boxes, drums and cylinders.

The Daily Stand-Up

At the ACCU Conference this year I managed to fulfil a lifelong ambition - do a stand-up comedy routine. OK, so it was only 5 minutes long (I did it as a lightning talk) and the audience and content was heavily programmer centric, but even so it seemed to go down a treat. A few people asked me to post the “set” that I did, so here it is.

The content all comes from my own tweets between 2009 and 2013 (except for a couple of more recent ones). Whilst this is the majority of the elapsed time I’ve been on Twitter, it only accounts for half of my tweets so far. This is because I was tweeting less than 100 times per-month at the beginning whereas I’m well over 400 per-month these days. Who says I’m an addict. It also means there should be enough content to do another routine next year (you have been warned).

I’d like to believe that it’s all my own work but the phenomena that is Cryptomnesia suggests this likely won’t be the case. Even if many are my own original thoughts it’s very likely others have been there well before me. Still I hope that you find some originality somewhere in this batch of 30 or so quips and puns.

If you’re trying to recreate the atmosphere of the original event then you’ll need to deliver these in a deadpan manner.

“My wife bought me some jigsaws of famous computer scientists for Christmas. She asked how I was getting on. I said: it’s Turing complete.”

“I think Turing was a wicked mathematician and computer scientist. In fact I’d say he was da bombe.”

“Speaking of mathematicians, when they work-out do they focus on their abs?”

“Was the Tower of Pisa built using lean manufacturing?”

“I know agile is all the rage but I think the writing is on the wall for kanban boards.”

“Are cross-functional teams just a bunch of grumpy LISP programmers.”

“I’ve been writing more functional code lately. I recently tried a few numerical recipes with currying functions, but all I got was a NaN.”

“The recent census had a box marked ‘Religion’. So I put ‘TDD’.”

“Why are we surprised that Git developers are so fanatical when everything they do is dictated by a SHA?”

“I’m getting the hang of mocking. During the last code review I said ‘this is rubbish!’, ‘what were you thinking?’ and ‘are you an idiot?’”

“When I work from home I like to get the kids involved with my coding. I call it Au Pair Programming.”

“Just because it’s called code doesn’t mean it has to be cryptic.”

“If technical debt is taking shortcuts, does that make bad programmers loan sharks?”

“Our code is so bad we don’t say ‘here be dragons’, we say ‘here be weeping angels’ because every time you blink the code looks worse.”

“I blame Facebook for the quality of SQL produced by young developers. They’re obsessed with likes.”

“When I see ‘static’ used in multi-threaded code it makes my hair stand on end.”

“I like the actor model for handling concurrency, but I find it suboptimal due to the constant need to talk to their agents.”

“I’ve been refactoring my code towards a more single-entry/single-exit style. It worked out well in the beginning but now there’s less impact due to the law of diminishing returns.”

“Singletons are like onions, the moment you touch one you end up in tears.”

“Inexperienced programmers are like inexperienced swimmers, they rely too heavily on floats.”

“I’m not saying the C programming standard is loose but I reckon it should be called Subjective-C.”

“C++ comes with complexity guarantees. If you write C++ it’s guaranteed to be complex.”

“Our system has five-nines reliability. It usually works about 45% of the time.”

“When Sherlock Holmes talks about a three-pipe problem does he mean it requires grep, sed, awk and sort?”

“My daughter asked what ABBA stands for. I said 43,962.”

“Once I pulled into an overflow car park and found myself right back at the entrance.”

“I don’t understand the point of graph databases. There must be an easier way to draw a bar chart.”

“Isn’t it depressing that everything we create ends up in a folder called ‘bin’.”

“If a team mate tells you to use more lynx they mean you have a problem with body odour, not that you need to test you web site with a text-only browser.”

“If you’re going to write a résumé for a C++ job don’t forget to add your cv-qualifiers.”

“I’ve enlisted the help of Simon Cowell to help me manage my passwords. It’s called X-Factor authentication.”

“Our interfaces are less cohesive and more adhesive. Developers keep sticking new methods on the end.”

“Our codebase has so many try/catch blocks that it often feels like a game of throwns.”

“When Amazon start using drones to deliver parcels I’m going to mess with them by sticking a robots.txt on the front door.”

My ACCU 2013 Conference Session - Robust Software

I once again have the pleasure of being accepted to speak at this year’s ACCU conference in Bristol. My session is on the Thursday (11th April) and is titled “Robust Software – Dotting the I’s and Crossing the T’s”. Here is the full conference schedule and below that the abstract for my talk.

http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2013/accu2013_schedule

It’s been said that the first 90% of a project consumes 90% of the time, whereas the second 10 % accounts for the other 90% of the time. One reason might be because elevating software from “mostly works” to robust and supportable requires an attention to detail in the parts of a system that are usually mocked out during unit testing. It’s all too easy to focus on testing the happy paths and gloss over the more tricky design problems such as how to handle a full disk or Cheshire cat style network.

This session delves into those less glamorous non-functional requirements that crop up the moment you start talking to hard disks, networks, databases, etc. Unsurprisingly it will have a fair bit to say about detecting and recovering from errors; starting with ensuring that you generate them correctly in the first place. This will undoubtedly lead on to the aforementioned subject of testing systemic effects. Finally there will also be diversions into the realms of monitoring and configuration as we look into the operational side of the code once it’s running.

At the end you will hopefully have smiled at the misfortune of others (mostly me) and added a few more items to the ever growing list of “stuff I might have to think about when developing software”.

My ACCU Conference Session - Database Development Using TDD

It’s been a busy few weeks as I’ve been preparing to present at the 2012 ACCU Conference in Oxford. This has become somewhat of a pilgrimage and for the second year running I’ve been accepted as one of the speakers; this time to talk about using TDD to develop databases. This was an excuse to piece together some of the ideas that I’ve been blogging about along with the experiences gained with my current client to present one way that can use tests to drive both the development and design of a database.

Session Details

The talk started by walking you through the pre-requisites needed to embrace TDD, such as your own development sandbox and looked at the primary testing mechanism[*], i.e. unit testing SQL. I also spent a fair bit of time covering the notion of a database’s public interface as I personally feel that the modern RDBMS gives you the tools to build an abstraction layer to help decouple the client from the data model to grant freedom of implementation[#].

Naturally I explained the principles of TDD and did a 20 minute live coding session to show how I would use them to develop a reporting style stored procedure. For this I used my own SS-Unit testing framework and SQL Server Express; switching rapidly between test code & production code. With the main body of the talk in the bag I turned to the opportunities that TDD (although really unit testing) opens up such as continuous integration, continuous deployment and schema refactoring.

The PowerPoint slides are available on my web site here.

Abstract

Just for the record this was the abstract that I submitted...

The modern day RDBMS is a complex product that offers so much more than just data persistence. The SQL language, with its vendor specific variants such as T-SQL, provides the ability to develop code in various forms to read, transform & write that data efficiently. This code requires constant testing right from its inception through its various incarnations until it is finally retired.

TDD is a technique that puts writing those tests at the front of the development process, whether that be because you’re writing new code or changing existing code. The knock-on effect of this approach is that your client-based perspective opens your eyes to potential variations in the implementation, and that is where the second ‘D’ in TDD turns from Development into Design. With a solid automated test suite and Continuous Integration under your belt too the world of refactoring opens itself up so that your database design can safely evolve.

This session looks at applying the same principles and disciplines used in other areas of system development to tame the ever increasing complexity that has arisen from the maturity of the RDBMS.

Photo

The above photo of yours truly comes courtesy of Mark Ridgwell. Here are the rest of his photos for Wednesday.

[*] TDD does not prescribe any particular type of testing but I believe that most people associate TDD with unit testing as it probably forms the lions share. I did point out that one of the benefits of a top-design and implementation is that you can start development with a system test and drill down from there.

[#] ORM tools like Entity Framework actually push you in the other direction which may be exactly what you want. But as I’ve said before, Enterprise culture has a habit of routing around nicely designed service layers and attempting to go straight to the heart of the data.

My First Presentation

Last Thursday[+] saw me popping my “presentation” cherry as I stood up in front of a small crowd of around 35 people and waffle on for 60 minutes about unit testing database code (SQL). The size of the audience and the number of questions at the end and in the pub afterwards makes me feel that it can probably be chalked up as a success. I certainly got a buzz out of it and more importantly I’m glad to get one under my belt before the ACCU Conference in April where I’ll be presenting “Using xUnit As a Swiss Army Testing Toolkit”.

It was pretty obvious from my twitter feed that I was more than a little bit nervous and even though I had a few calming replies from my fellow ACCU members I was still somewhat pensive. The ACCU is full of very smart people and the topic on which I was speaking was not what I would consider one of my core skills and so I was well aware that the room would contain people far more knowledgeable than me on the subject. The nightmare scenario was one of those people asking the kind of ‘obvious’ question that would invalidate the entire talk. The basis for this is some of the ‘heckles’ that I’ve seen at past conferences and talks. Fortunately they were unfounded… this time.

So what did I learn from the experience? Well, it’s kind of nice being the centre of attention for an hour or so :-) The biggest thing, and I’ve said this before about blogging, is that it makes you think even harder about your topic so you feel doubly sure you don’t say anything really stupid. When first asked by Allan Kelly to do a talk for ACCU London I reluctantly said ‘yes’ as I find originality a big stumbling block – I’m always assuming that I need to say something novel. Because of the ACCU’s heritage[*] I didn’t want to say anything C++ related, I don’t know anything about Java, the iPhone, Python etc and anyway those angles are already well covered by other prominent members so that pretty much left something C#/SQL based. I also didn’t want to do a shorter version of my upcoming conference talk so I looked back over my blog for inspiration and realised I had a few posts relating to database development that I could probably stitch together into a coherent piece And so the following blog posts were fused together to the form the meat of the session:-

xUnit Style Database Unit Testing
Simple Database Build & Deployment With SQLCMD

…with the following posts providing some additional minor content:-

Debug & Release Database Schemas
Implementing Constants & Enumerations in a Database

Naturally I had extravagant plans when planning it 3 months earlier. I was going to develop my own test runner and follow Paul Grenyer’s fine example by running actual tests with a live demo. I was also going to have a few vibrant slides and follow Martin Fowler’s lead by eschewing bullet point lists and unnecessary images. And then Xmas came and went and like any real student the deadline was looming and still I only had a rough outline.

My wife, who fortunately knows a thing or two about presenting[#], and more importantly knows a thing or two about her lazy husband, provided some sage advice to get me bootstrapped. It didn’t take long to realise I was never going to have time for the live demos (either beforehand or during the talk for that matter) and I also dropped the ‘clever’ slides in favour of creating what were essentially a giant bunch of queue cards. Once I had gone through the entire talk for real I decided I probably shouldn’t try and run before I can walk…

This may seem really obvious to everyone else but there is a world of difference between talking in your head and saying it out loud. I spent a number of train journeys on my commute planning the talk and then going through it in my head, i.e. actually talking in my head to practice what I was going to say – I didn’t think my fellow passengers would be that interested in the content and they might also find it a little repetitive :-). So when I came to practice it out loud I got to hear all the pauses and umm’s and errr’s and it was truly disheartening. I practiced it again over the next few evenings and although the talk become more fluent, I was still annoyed with myself for forgetting to say certain things. My wife stepped in once more with another ‘obvious’ piece of advice “The audience doesn’t have a script, so they won’t know what you did and didn’t mean to say”. She also said that if a point was truly important I wouldn’t forget it. Boy it annoys me how that women is always right! I still ditched one slide right at the last minute as I realised the content was effectively irrelevant, it also was hard to convey fluently and would help bring me back to nearer the 60 minute mark.

On the night it seemed to go pretty much according to plan, except for the technical problems getting my laptop and the projector to acknowledge each other’s presence. I only remember losing my train of thought once and I believe I got all the key points in just like my wife said I would :-). I felt the urge on a number of occasions to ad-lib as I thought of something new or different to say but I held fast and stuck to the content I’d been practicing. If I ever get to do the talk again I guess I can always ‘refactor’[^] it. It was also nice to be able to point out two members of the audience (Phil Nash & Steve Love) whilst acknowledging their ‘indirect’ contributions.

After I had finished rabbiting there were a number of questions ranging from the classic “how do you get your developers to write tests?” to one from fellow member Ed Sykes about whether it’s possible to get code coverage for SQL based tests? No, I don’t know. In the pub afterwards we got to chew the fat further and a few more ideas popped into my head. The question now is whether the alcohol killed off too many brain cells or whether I can still recall what they were for future blogging purposes…

All-in-all a wonderful experience and hopefully an excellent bit of practice in preparation for the main event - the ACCU conference in April.

FWIW Here is a link to the slides (PowerPoint).

[+] The photo was taken by fellow ACCU member Schalk Cronje.

[*] There are members who sit on the C++ panel! They know more than than just their onions…

[#] She’s a producer of live events and one of her many talents is to train and rehearse speakers.

[^] I guess that means “the message” stays the same but I say it in a different way.

My ACCU 2011 Session Proposal - Using xUnit As a Swiss Army Testing Toolkit

I’ve decided to be brave and submit a session proposal for next year’s ACCU Conference. I know if I get accepted that means I’ll have to curtail the relentless late nights in the bar – at least until I’ve given my presentation. Anyway, the catalyst for my proposal was my blog back in March titled Integration Testing with NUnit. Not long after posting that I watched Paul Grenyer give a presentation to the London branch of the ACCU that touched on similar ground. My session is intended to take the idea further still and cover use of the xUnit style in other areas where perhaps custom test scripts and tools might have been written such as API exploration and verifying external systems.

Session Summary

Title: Using xUnit As a Swiss Army Testing Toolkit
Type: Tutorial/Case Study
Duration: 90 minutes
Speaker: Chris Oldwood

Speaker Biography

Chris started out as a bedroom coder in the 80s writing assembler on 8-bit micros; these days it’s C++ and C# on Windows in big plush corporate offices. His career has covered both shrink wrapped applications and in-house systems with the past 5 years focusing on grid-based distributed systems in the Finance industry. When not attached to a keyboard and screen he has a wife and four children to entertain, dips his toe in the local swimming pool and provides the commentary for the annual Godmanchester Gala Day Duck Race.

Session Description

Modern Unit Testing practices act as a conduit for improved software designs that are more amenable to change and can be easily backed by automation for fast feedback on quality assurance. The necessity of reducing external dependencies forces us to design our modules with minimum coupling which can then be leveraged both at the module, component and subsystem levels in our testing. As we start to integrate our units into larger blocks and interface our resulting components with external systems we find ourselves switching nomenclature as we progress from Unit to Integration testing. But is a change in mindset and tooling really required?

The xUnit testing framework is commonly perceived as an aid to Unit Testing but the constraints that it imposes on the architecture mean that it is an excellent mechanism for invoking arbitrary code in a restricted context. Tests can be partitioned by categorisation at the test and fixture level and through physical packaging leading to a flexible test code structure. Throw in its huge popularity and you have a simplified learning curve for expressing more that just unit tests.

Using scenarios from his current system Chris aims to show how you can use a similar format and tooling for unit, component and integration level tests; albeit with a few liberties taken to work around the inherent differences with each methodology.

My ACCU Conference 2010 Lightning Talk

At this years ACCU 2010 Conference I decided to be brave and enter in for a Lightning Talk. These are 5 minute presentations on pretty much anything you like – although it helps to have some relevance to the hosting event :-) If you so desire you can provide a few background slides, but with only 5 minutes of talking time you probably won’t need many.

The premise of my talk was a homage to the BBC 2 TV comedy show Room 101. Each week a different celebrity tries to convince the host (Paul Merton) that some things they dislike (physical, emotional or whatever) are truly appalling and should be banished from this Earth. Think “Crazy Frog” and you should get the general gist. For my talk I picked three of Microsoft’s products that have somehow managed to attain immortal status in the development world when they should have been retired years ago. The fact that they are all products from Microsoft should suggest nothing about my opinions of Microsoft per se (after all I work solely on their platform through my own choice) but more about the mentality of the companies that have managed to tie themselves so inextricably to the products in question. Funnily enough Udi Dahan sort of covered similar ground himself a few weeks ago – though in a far more intelligent fashion of course.

Given that the slides are going to be up on the ACCU web site I decided that it might be worth adding a little prose to go alongside them and to try and diffuse any flames that might arise from my last slide – should the comment about jQuery be taken at face value. So, if you want to play along at home you can pull up the slides on the ACCU website here, or you can just imagine these bullet points are some slick PowerPoint presentation. Obviously reading the text below won’t have anywhere near the same impact as me standing in front of an audience because what little intonation and comedy timing there was will be completely lost :-) I’m not sure exactly what I said but it went something like this…

Visual SourceSafe

• 10 Analyze.exe –F, 20 GOTO 10
• More chatty than Alan Carr
• Working Folder randomiser

My first choice is the proverbial “Punch Bag” of Version Controls Systems. If you Google “Visual SourceSafe” you’ll quickly discover that the most common complaint is about how it has the ability to corrupt your source code database on a regular occurrence. One of the first automated tasks you learn to create is one to run analyze.exe to find and fix any errors - that assumes of course you can persuade Visual Studio to leave the repository alone long enough to actually run the tool.

One sure-fire way to corrupt your database is to use VSS over a VPN. If you don’t manage to kill your network with the excessive SMB traffic caused by the file-system based architecture you’ll eventually be greeted with the legendry “Invalid DOS handle” error message. At this point you’ll be executing the “20 GOTO 10” part of this slide as your entire team “downs tools” once more.

But not all weirdness is the result of repository corruption, sometimes tools like Visual Studio will try and “help you out” by explicitly setting the “Working Folder” for a project which you later moved to another more suitable location. Now your code lives in one part of the hierarchy in VSS but in the working copy it’s back where it started! So now you start deleting all those .scc files along with the usual .ncb and .suo files in hope that you’ll remove whatever it is that seems to link the project with its past life.

Visual C++ 6

• Visual Studio 1998 (10 is the new 6)
• #if _MSC_VER < 1300
• It’s Visual C++

My second choice is Microsoft’s flagship C++ compiler. As you can see this was also know as Visual Studio 1998. Yes, that’s a year from another millennia!  So, how many of you bought a copy of Andrei Alexandrescu’s seminal book “Modern C++ Design”? And how many of you put it straight back on the shelf when you discovered that you couldn’t even compile the first example because your compilers’ template support was so broken? This compiler was released before the current standard was finalised and it’s interesting to note that some Microsoft bloggers used the phrase “10 is the new 6” when writing about the upcoming Visual Studio 2010. This was a reference to the supposed performance enhancements going into making VS2010 as nippy as VC6, but it seems more amusing to point out that they are going to make the same mistake again and release a major C++ compiler version just before the next C++ standard is finalised.

Many developers think that Boost is incredibly complex because it uses lots of clever Template Meta-Programming. It’s not. It’s because every class has to be implemented twice. One inside an “#if _MSC_VER < 1300” guard for Visual C++ 6 users and another for every other compiler to use.

It’s interesting to note that many recruitment agencies ask for Visual C++ experience, instead of just plain C++, as if somehow it’s a different language? Mind you, given the number of supposedly experienced C++ developers I’ve interviewed in recent years that still believe the default container type is CArray and not std::vector it makes me wonder if the recruitment consultants aren’t actually right on this one.

Internet Explorer 6

• The Corporate Standard
• MDI is so 90’s
• jQuery is fanning the flames

My final choice is Internet Explorer 6. Despite what the cool kids think, this is still the standard web browser in many large corporations. Putting popup iframes on a web site that tells me I’m using a lame browser doesn’t help me fell any better either – if I could do something about it I would. In one organisation you get a virus warning if you try to install a more modern browser like Firefox.

I’ve come to believe that Tabbed Browsing is a right and not a privilege. How I am supposed to adhere to the company’s clean desk policy when IE litters my desktop with Windows and my taskbar with little ‘e’ icons?

I partially lay the blame for the continued existence of IE6 at the feet of jQuery. It used to be hard to support because you needed to know how to code around all its little quirks and foibles. jQuery now makes it easy to support again. Please stop doing that! We want it to be hard so that we have a reason to get off this merry-go-round.

Epilogue

Sadly all three products look like they’re going to be with us for some time yet. So, would anyone like to wager a bet on which we’ll see first - the death of one of these atrocities or the first Liberal Democrat government? [*]

 

[*] Apparently politics was out of bounds, but I felt this incredibly cheap shot was far too good to pass up :-)

Two Book Reviews Published in This Month’s C Vu Magazine

The current issue of C Vu (Volume 21, Issue 6 - one of the journals published by the ACCU) has two book reviews from yours truly. The first is for the 3rd edition of UML Distilled by Martin Fowler, and the other is for The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen. Neither book is exactly new and the latter I read some years ago, but I noticed a couple of gaps in the book reviews on the ACCU website (which are searchable by non-members as well as members) and thought I’d fill them in. Both books get a big thumbs up from me*. Of course if you want to read the reviews you’ll either need to subscribe to the ACCU so that you can download back issues of C Vu and Overload, or wait for them to be published on the website.

*Given the name of this blog and the contents of my very first post I don’t think this will be much of a surprise to anyone.

My First Published Articles

Today the postman delivered the July 2009 issue of C Vu - the magazine of the ACCU. In it features two pieces by yours truly :-) Okay, so these aren't a couple of earth shattering discoveries about modern software development, but a couple of reviews. The longer review is of the 2009 ACCU Conference back in April, and the shorter is of the ACCU London meeting in May which featured Jeff Sutherland.

I guess the reason I'm more than a little pleased with myself is that I find writing hard. This is exemplified by the fact that I got U's for both my English Language and Literature O'Levels. For those of you unaware of the English school system, O'Levels were the exams you took at 16 - now called GCSE's. You were graded from A-E, with U covering everything below an E. The standing joke from my fellow classmates was that you got an E just for writing your name on the paper! An English language O'Level of grade C or above is pretty much required for any form of higher education in England so I had to retake until I got one... and I did the following year thankfully.

Once I left University I was glad to leave all that writing malarkey behind, I thought that Computer Programming was a great career where I would never have to write essays again. Somehow I managed to avoid any sort of formal writing for over a decade, with class descriptions in UML models being the largest paragraphs I wrote.

But this all changed when I switched jobs a few years ago. The company I joined required me to write some formal documentation for the Build System and other processes I had developed. The documents were painful to write but I actually found myself enjoying it, probably because I was writing about something that I actually liked and knew about. The distributed team structure also meant that email was the main form of communication and so constant writing started to become the norm.

I still find writing very hard and so I started this blog in the hope that it would help me improve my skills further. So far I'm still enjoying the process (probably because blogging allows me to talk about, well, me :-). Perhaps I would have got that English O'Level a little quicker if blogging had been around when I was at school...

Who is the ACCU?

Some diligent readers may have noticed that I described Matthew Wilson as "a fellow ACCU member" and are wandering what the ACCU is. Well it's not some kind of secret religious cult - on the contrary they also allow mere mortals like me and you to join! Rather than screw up the possibility of recruiting new members by trying to succinctly describe what the ACCU is about I'll leave it to the front page of the ACCU website (http://accu.org/):-

"ACCU is an organisation of programmers who care about professionalism in programming and are dedicated to raising the standard of programming."

Once upon a time the "CC" in ACCU stood for C/C++, but these days it is far more diverse. In one of the Lightning Talks at this years ACCU conference (http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2009) there was a straw poll on the primary language used by the attendees and there was a considerable show of hands for Java and C#. Python also features quite regularly on "ACCU-General" which is the organisations main mailing list.

I'm a relative newcomer to ACCU (I only joined in 2006) and came to find out about it by working at one of the major investment banks that has quite a few members in its ranks. I was lamenting the loss of CUJ (The C/C++ Users Journal) and asked on the internal chat system where I was going to get my [printed] fix of C++. I was told that the ACCU publishes two journals, C Vu and Overload which are packed with top quality articles about all aspects of software engineering amongst other benefits. I thought I'd try it for a year and see how it pans out. I only wish I'd known about it when I started my career back in the early 90's!

At £35 per year, membership is cheaper than a subscription to CUJ, MSDN Magazine, TechNet etc. and in return you get a journal per month of quality articles, but more importantly, you get access via the mailing lists to some really smart cookies.

The highlight of the year is probably the ACCU conference, which is held in Oxford during April. This is 4 days of high-bandwidth communication with such luminaries as Andrei Alexandrescu, Nicolai Josuttis, Robert Martin, Kevlin Henney etc. During the day you listen to various speakers talking about all sorts of aspects of software engineering, but more importantly, during the evening (and most of the night :-) you get to speak to many of them one-to-one over a pint or two in the bar. Of course you also get to meet a whole bunch of other like minded souls and share experiences with them as well.

If you're still unsure that your £35 buys you excellent value for money, you can view back issues of Overload online here - http://accu.org/index.php/overloadonline.

See you soon on "accu-general"...