Purchases,
New torch needed as the free one from the AA had died, wind up thing, good idea just not durable, they are around on ebay for a few pounds.
Gave this cheap torch a go from lighting ever, £10 on amazon. The reason this is good is the cree LED, which takes it down to one less than laser eye surgery, it is BRIGHT!
More than good enough for the car, depending on how durable the torch is I will end buying some for xmas presents. It is metal, the finish is not marvelous, mine arrived with a couple of dings.
Books read,
Thinking fast and slow by Danial Kahneman, this book has been tough going and made me think about how I actually think, WYSIATI ( what you see is all there is ). Regression to the mean and problem solving is actually hard work.
Apart from that I have been using plural site to look at automated tests and clean code, after seeing some clean code and trying to implement some of the ideas the intent of each section and what to do is so much easier. To that end I have added clean code and the clean coder to the reading list, which I will get too after c# design patterns has been read through.
I've been trying to get more in depth with visual studio, because if I can make it do the work, why not?
This led to looking at more shortcuts, well worth looking through them properly more than once,
http://visualstudioshortcuts.com/
For visual studio 2013, 813 shortcuts!
From that, F10 to run the line of code that is stopped on the break point.
When throwing an exception in C# in the catch block if you re-throw for example throw ex; you lose the original call stack for the exception. Use throw; and this will retain the original call stack whilst throwing the exception.
Things I should have done ages ago, signed up properly with plural site. Why? Even the videos which weren't very helpful I learn at least one thing per course. Sometimes these are very simple ideas or how to use a tool better.
Purchases, this week it is a computer chair, the old one was looking rather desperate for repair. Looked around and lifehacker have some good reviews. I went with the IKEA Markus, it is actually a good chair and helpful with the recent warm weather, not the cheapest of chairs at £125 but I like it.
I have found it difficult to manage my reading list, the easiest way for me has been to add books to amazon wish list which then can be easily reviewed.
Buying books can be expensive, amazon is not always the best option, play is actually very good and can be significantly cheaper than amazon.
Gone a bit mad with the car stuff this week, bought an impact driver, which will be handy when brake disc retaining screws get stuck. I chose the Halfords impact driver over the draper from amazon because of the lifetime warranty ( for some reason the receipt must be kept ) and comes with more impact bits.
Cleaned up my cars headlights, the headlights were rough feeling, dull, and had yellowed, although the pictures do not show the yellowing well. I used the 3M Headlight kit, found a coating called opti-lens which seems to be a permanent solution to UV damage on plastic headlights.
There were a few reviews of the 3M kit not coming with enough tape which you do have to double up on however there was more than enough so much so I didn't even need the roll purchased separately.
The results have been good, driving at night the beam cut off is now visible, brighter and whiter, which will be handy on the unlit country roads of which there are a lot locally.
Computing this week has mostly been plural site, .net code reviews being quite useful and can now make some suggestions at work.
I want to start to use more of short cuts and code snippets so a list of those which make sense to me will be put up next time.
Good week at work fixed a few things and getting to grips with nunit and a moment of madness thought this was actually included within visual studio.
Minor fix that helped a bit is that ajax modal pop up extender, when using fire fox and post backs the pop up might not always be hidden properly, easy fix. Set the on cancel script to a javascript function on that page setting the container div style to display none.
Books read, Debug It! Some good tips, about using asserts outside of unit testing which can be handy for producing fragile code within the development environment and robust on production. This works well for internal classes where the input has already been sanitized. Errors should not happen but placing an assert to check for null makes the code fragile and points to the errors much sooner.
The book has certainly changed the way I code, with much more emphasis on diagnosis and dealing with root causes.
Fun thing purchased, ultra sonic detector £13 from Amazon, got a few cheeps from the pet rats, lots of rustling sounds from metal, and buzzing from compact florescent bulbs. Haven't seen any bats yet apart from the cat bought in a dead pipistrelle so they are about some where.
Here is my first attempt at blogging, I am a junior tester and to document my journey through testing and development, books that are worth reading, what helped me get started and maybe some car bits as I like to take stuff apart!
Aiming at the moment for one post per week and to include any quick fixes I find to help me remember them.
