December 2007

Shamelessly copying an idea from James Cridland, here are the top pages by traffic for 2007. The total number of page views was around 150,000 with these ten pages accounting for just over 50,000 of them.

To Those About to Hack — 10

A follow up to Hacknot's parable about the importance of preparation, I wanted to add something about the importance of focusing on the goal — the task the client really needs us to do rather than the one they ask for.

C++ killed the get & set accessors — 9

This article describing a template technique for automatically generated accessors is something that I continue to use in my own code and it saves me a lot of time. The meta-accessors is something that I find myself using more and more.

Pseudo scientific Software Engineering — 8

This is another take on the same principle in story at number ten.

sourcesafe2subversion Migration tool — 7

This tool continues to be popular with people moving from Visual SourceSafe. At some point in early 2008 there will be new release.

Why misunderstanding object orientation sucks — 6

When I first wrote this I didn't know who Joe Armstrong was… I'd be very interested to know if his views about object orientation were still as extreme.

Recursive rights and wrongs — 5

This is one of the sorts of basic tutorial topics that I really wanted to cover on this site. I'm pleased that this one continues to draw readers.

Moving from Visual SourceSafe to Subversion — 4

This article really could do with an update, something I'll do after Subversion 1.5 is released. Now that I've been using Subversion for long enough to develop some better work habits with it I'd also like to write a bit about the differences in work practice between it and Visual SourceSafe—especially as regards to shared files as this is the one SourceSafe feature that Subversion doesn't have.

Ghost on the beach — 3

I hope nobody thinks this is a real ghost picture.

สงกรานต์—Songkran — 2

April in Thailand is very hot, but this festival makes it a worthwhile time to visit anyway.

Internationalised URLs — 1

I think the problems described here are intractable. Too many people who write software that processes URLs just don't care if they understand them properly.