- https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/standardize-development-environment-with-devcontainers/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GitHub_Codespaces – mentioned there (be aware: Microsoft owns GitHub)
Category: software development
-
“Dev Container” – a Linux standard established by Microsoft? devcontainer.json
-
Mockaroo – Random Data Generator and API Mocking Tool | JSON / CSV / SQL / Excel
A free test data generator and API mocking tool – Mockaroo lets you create custom CSV, JSON, SQL, and Excel datasets to test and demo your software.
https://www.mockaroo.comAs a sys admin or DevOps you are urged rather often by software developers to illegally provide them with data from production environments. The next developer will get pointed to Mockaroo.
-
a car and a website – do they have anything in common?
Within the car I have in mind and I came across, its parts communicate using CANopen. The car’s software got mostly implemented in Ada, and once there existed a (home-brewn) software generator Ada code for CANopen message definitions. From the CANopen message definitions the generator created:
- data structures in Ada
- marshalling code
- de-marshalling code
There was still an ongoing development of the car, but because the generator got lost or abandoned, the software developers had to maintain and extend the generated code themselves. That’s a violation of a basic principle of course: Do not touch generated code! And it’s also quite a challenging task. They did a great job, but certainly they failed occasionally, and there are some cars out there with incorrect code.
I found the situation quite sad. And that triggered my creativity.
- I created a CANopen definition language in XML using RELAX-NG.
- I reconstructed the definitions of the CANopen messages used in the car.
- I developed a new generator.
- I created the code for the 1st car, compared it to the existing code step by step, … and finally the car still worked.
- I did so for all the cars’ software I found around. But unfortunately the cars themselves were not available on site.
Now for my current project: web development in HTML + Perl + JavaScript + CSS + “a home-brewn web-template-framework in Perl”. And where would be the similarity? The home-brewn web-template-framework got abandoned. Just the generated code is still in use and gets extended and maintained continuously. So new HTML does no longer get created through the framework but rather on the fly through JavaScript. That’s quite a funny and exciting way of writing HTML. And I am deeply impressed.
I am not sure, which framework would be the right thing to suggest for the next generation of this software.
-
reverse engineering costs so much more time than writing “difficult” code
I am facing code, that is really hard to read, and I am attempting to give it a little more structure, so that it is trivial to grasp. But that costs time and grief.
-
O’Reilly Media book: Becoming a Better Programmer
Pete Goodliffe, author of Code Craft, presents several lessons that will help you go beyond just being a good coder. You’ll learn how to become a better worker, a better team member, and even a better person. This is a book for people who care about code, who are passionate about the way they create it, and who want to do an even better job.
-
Is Text the Programmers Silver Bullet?
Will programming ever depart the land of text? I loved this article on the divides between user and programmer cultures, but sharing it brought responses on the values of programmer culture. Every time I wonder publicly about programming interfaces, or …
via http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/01/is-text-the-programmers-silver-bullet.html
-
O’Reilly Media book: Agile Data Science
With this hands-on book, you’ll learn a flexible toolset and methodology for building effective analytics applications. Agile Data shows you how to create an environment for exploring data, using lightweight tools such as Ruby, Python, Apache Pig, and the D3.js (Data-Driven Documents) JavaScript library. You’ll learn an iterative approach that allows you to quickly change the kind of analysis you’re doing, as you discover what the data is telling you.