@praxagora: Steve McConnell traces research behind claims that programmer productivity can vary by factor of 10x http://bit.ly/g1EkXk

Steve McConnells ‘Code Complete’ was a real eye opener for me. It was one of the first books on programming I have read all the recommended titles since. I did however really enjoy Steve’s book since it gave me very much needed insight into the practice of programming rather than just syntactical teaching and idioms. This tweet mentions a blog entry is interesting in regard to a discussion on sources and references. Another thing that really stands out is the comments. I would love to be able to attract that amount of qualified feedback and comments, but I guess I have to start generating interesting content at first.

@mbusigin: MongoDB is becoming a fixture in my professional life. Nothing in the past year has given me more power & control over my data.

Alternative database systems are really on a roll and have been for some time.This kind of tweet makes just want to do something with MongoDB. This really demonstrates the power of a good tweet, enough to make you curious. MongoDB here I come.

@jchris: Developer Preview of Couchbase Mobile – Apache CouchDB for iOS devices: http://t.co/hvtxdZB Discuss: http://t.co/R8I21rh

Very much in relation to the previous mention of MongoDB. CouchDB is to become available for iOS. To recap from last week, Github is a central point in this another tweet worth more time investment.

@brandontreb: Great article talking about how developers need to be more encouraging to one another http://j.mp/fdhGHD

The last tweet is to a blog post. It is not the best of blog posts, but it holds some nerve. I can only say that I agree with the original author and I retweeted because the message is good and honest. I should go and comment on the original blog post.

Keep (re)tweeting,

jonasbn

As described earlier, when announcing the release of version 0.01, the module is used to handle a lot of data streams and some of them even rely on the same foundation. So caching seemed like a sane idea instead of building a multiplexer, which would fetch the data and then process the data for the different targets. The latter in general a sane solution, but implementing caching was both easy and seemed like good first shot at a solution.

The lucky thing was really that WWW::Mechanize the core module we use in WWW::DanDomain has a cousin WWW::Mechanize::Cached, which implements the same interface and therefor was easy to plug in.

In addition to the caching, the distribution now utilized Test::Prereq as part of its test suite. Unfortunately I again released a distribution (version 0.01), which did not have all requirements specified properly. This can be see from the smoke tests. Please see the blog entry on the same topic for another distribution for a more thorough explanation, there is no need to repeat it here.

I would much rather raise the attention to brian d foy’s Test::Prereq. This marvelous module actually assists me in not making this mistake again. So release 0.02 of WWW::DanDomain now contains a test, which check all requirements listed in the source code.

The only problem I have with Test::Prereq is its speed. It is quite slow, which btw. it quite understandable if you consider what it does. So instead of using it as part of the normal test suite, which I try to run as frequently as possible when developing, I classified the test as an author test.

The author test concept is using for special tests, which are used by CPAN contributors. The normal things is simply to let a some of the tests be controlled by an environment variable namely TEST_AUTHOR.

These tests only make sense to run for the author. So smoke testers and end-users do not need to run these, since the remaining test suites and build tools will make sure that the requirements are met or at least tested.

I sent a patch to brian d foy, via Github, where Test::Prereq is hosted and it was applied. But for those of you who cannot wait for brian d foy’s next release I will visualize my little contribution right here.

# http://search.cpan.org/~bdfoy/Test-Prereq/lib/Build.pm
# $Id: prerequisites.t 6328 2009-08-16 11:51:16Z jonasbn $
use strict;
use warnings;
use Test::More;
eval “use Test::Prereq::Build”;
my $msg;
if ($@) {
$msg = ‘Test::Prereq::Build required to test dependencies’;
} elsif (not $ENV{TEST_AUTHOR}) {
$msg = ‘Author test.  Set $ENV{TEST_AUTHOR} to a true value to run.’;
}
plan skip_all => $msg if $msg;
prereq_ok();