Clean git blame history

Tim Pizey from Tim Pizey

Place the following in a command file, run it within your repo:

#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch --env-filter '

an="$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME"
am="$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL"
cn="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME"
cm="$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL"

if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "timp@paneris.org" ]
then
an="Tim Pizey"
am="timp21337@paneris.org"
fi

if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "timp@paneris.org" ]
then
cn="Tim Pizey"
cm="timp21337@paneris.org"
fi

export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$an"
export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$am"
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$cn"
export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$cm"
'
Then git push -f origin master Note that this process is very slow so do not repeat for every change: add all the changes you want to make and perform in one pass.

ACCU 2019 presentation and book signing

Anthony Williams from Just Software Solutions Blog

The ACCU 2019 conference is running from 9th-13 April 2019, in Bristol, UK.

This year I will be presenting "Here's my number; call me, maybe. Callbacks in a multithreaded world" on 11th April. The abstract is:

A common pattern in multithreaded applications is the use of callbacks, continuations and task pipelines to divide the processing of data across threads. This has the benefit of ensuring that threads can quickly move on to further processing, and can minimize blocking waits, since tasks are only scheduled when there is work to be done.

The downside is that they can weave a tangled web of connections, and managing object lifetimes can now become complicated.

This presentation will look at ways of managing this complexity and ensuring that your code is as clear as possible, and there is no possibility of dangling references or leaked objects.

I will also be signing copies of the second edition of my book C++ Concurrency In Action now that it is finally in print.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Posted by Anthony Williams
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New website and chips, please

Products, the Universe and Everything from Products, the Universe and Everything

At Riverblade we know how to celebrate finishing a project

If you are reading this you might have noticed that the Riverblade website has undergone a bit of a redesign.

This is something we've been working on for a little while in the background, and we think it's probably now at least good enough to let loose on the world. We hope that you find the new responsive website to be an improvement on the old one.

Template aside, the design and implementation was done in-house, so it's entirely our own work and therefore any bug/content fixes should be relatively quick (as an aside, we did contract out a redesign a while back, but we never released it because we weren't happy with the design the external consultancy produced).

Along with the new design, we've also moved most of the content to a new domain (riverblade.co).

We've tried to make all of the redirects automatic, but needless to say if you discover any broken links, typos etc. please do let us know.

(and in case you are wondering: we have indeed been known to celebrate finishing a project with Prosecco and fish and chips).

Pennies From Heaven – baron m.

baron m. from thus spake a.k.

Sir R-----, my good friend! Come shake the snow from your boots and join me by the hearth for a draught of warming spirits!

And will you also join me in a wager whilst you let the fire chase the chill from your bones?

Fine fellow! Stout fellow!

I have in mind a game that reminds me of my raid upon the vault of Heaven, which I mounted in order to make amends to the Empress for my failure to snatch the Amulet of Yendor from the inner circle of Hell.

Keybase chat bot in 10 lines of bash

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam's Blog

I’ve been getting very excited about keybase.io recently, not least because it offers secure conversation, and you can have bots.

I wrote a quick bot to simulate Arnold Schwarzenegger which I thought I’d share to demonstrate how easy it is. It is based on the keybase command line tool (which comes with the desktop client as standard) and jq, the brilliant command-line JSON manipulator.

For this to work, you need to have the keybase command installed and working, and you need jq.

Here’s the bot:

#!/bin/bash
CHANNEL=mychannel
keybase chat api-listen | while read L; do
{
    OUT=$(jq --raw-output 'select(.type == "chat")|select(.msg.content.text.body|startswith("!arnie "))| .msg.content.text.body | "*" + ltrimstr("!arnie ") + "*"' <<< "$L")
    if [ "${OUT}" != "" ]; then
    {
        keybase chat send "${CHANNEL}" "${OUT}"
    }; fi
}; done

and here's it working:

andy> !arnie Do eet do eet now!!!
andy> Do eet do eet now!!!

Note: here the bot is pretending to be me. To do this nicely, you will want a different account for the bot, but you get the idea.

Obviously, I am now working on a comprehensive bot framework in Rust. Watch this space.

An (agile) coach’s dilemma

Allan Kelly from Allan Kelly Associates

iStock-521796758s-2019-02-13-14-54.jpg

I’d never met the team before. It was a small company in Cornwall and the big boss man was away on holiday that week. They took me upstairs to the meeting room. We talked for about an hour and I could tell there was something on their mind.

Eventually one of them asked:

“we have this question we’ve been talking about for ages we’d like you to help with.”

This was it, the $64,000 question.

“Ask” I said.

“Well… should we be using source code control?”

To some of you this might sound funny, to others shocking, but believe me, on average I meet one team a year who don’t use source code control. On this day I had two voices, one in each ear.

The voice in my left issue said:

“You are only a coach, you are here to help them make their own decisions. Talk about their goals, what they want to achieve, find out if they think source code control could help them. Let them explore why it might be the wrong choice.”

The voice in my other ear said:

“Jesus Christ…”

On the one hand the (agile) coach is there to help the team reach their best. The coach isn’t there to tell them what to do, the people – the team – are the experts in what they do, and they are self-organising. The coach is there to help them unlock their superhero powers.

On the other hand: the coach has done this before. If they are any good they have not only worked with many teams before and read many reports in books and blogs but they wrote the reports, their teams are in the case studies. The team may well be experts in Java, JavaScript, inertial navigation, limb-replacements or whatever but the coach is the expert in agile. The coach is there to teach.

If you’ve read about coaching in other contexts you might recognise this as a question of non-directive coaching v. directive coaching. Agile, and agile coaching has never really come to terms with that differentiation.

As a coach you have next to no authority, all you can hope is that the coachees come to respect you and trust you enough to follow your suggestions. But then, maybe you shouldn’t be suggesting anything?

But if you claim to know anything – about coaching, about agile and heaven forbid software development – is it right to hold back on them when you know the answer? Isn’t it dishonest not to say what you know – or at least sincerely believe – to be true?

And if you can see what they need to do, don’t tell them but work to help them see that answer, well… thats just manipulation isn’t it?

When do you allow free will and when do you railroad?
When do you unlock self-knowledge and when do you teach?
When do you let people take decisions you can see are mistakes?
When do you know facts that will help? And when are you just full of the same biases as everyone else?

Take the documentation question: classically trained developers who have never worked in high-performing teams commonly see documentation as the answer to so many questions:

Question: How do we make sure requirements are clear?
Answer: Documentation

Q: How do we help new recruits find their way around the system?
A: Documentation

Q: How do we keep track of the code design?
A: Documentation

Q: How do we agree which bugs to fix?
A: Documentation

Q: How do we communicate with customers?
A: Documentation

Some people just don’t know what they don’t know.

I too was trained that documentation was the answer to these questions and more, I too saw the lack of documentation as a major problem when I started work somewhere new. It took time (and Railtrack PLC) for me to realise documentation wasn’t the answer, it was John Seely Brown and Julian Orr who help me to realise documentation was a problem, and it took Capers Jones to make me see the cost of documentation.

But should I impose my view of documentation on a team? – should I even be making them see the world as I do?

Ultimately the team are self-organizing. They have the right to document, or not to document, and they can decide to ditch the coach. (Being an agile coach can be a high risk profession.)

Ultimately they are allowed to self-organize long (seated) morning meetings. They are allowed to reject TDD, BDD, CD, CI and just about every other agile practice.

And you know what? They could be right.

Coaches need to be self-aware and with that self-awareness comes self-doubt. Just because a team doesn’t follow the normal rule book doesn’t mean they are wrong. They could have a better solution. They could have a solution that works better in their context.

Back in Cornwall, I paused for a few moments while the angels on my shoulders argued their case. Then I said:

“Put it like this, without source code control I wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”

With that question settled I moved onto the issues. What problems would it create? Why wouldn’t you use source code control? What is the worst that could happen? What difference would big boss man see?

Arse about face really but it worked. The following morning I walked into their office and found them checking everything in.

Eight years later that small company has grown more than 20 fold: would they have done that if I had answered differently? Might they have done even better? Did I make a difference or was it all them?

But I still face dilemmas like that everyday I’m “coaching”.


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The post An (agile) coach’s dilemma appeared first on Allan Kelly Associates.

Offer of free analysis of your software engineering data

Derek Jones from The Shape of Code

Since the start of this year, I have been telling people that I willing to analyze their software engineering data for free, provided they are willing to make the data public; I also offer to anonymize the data for them, as part of the free service. Alternatively you could read this book, and do the analysis yourself.

What will you get out of me analyzing your data?

My aim is to find patterns of behavior that will be useful to you. What is useful to you? You have to be the judge of that. It is possible that I will not find anything useful, or perhaps any patterns at all; this does not happen very often. Over the last year I have found (what I think are useful) patterns in several hundred datasets, with one dataset that I am still scratching my head over it.

Data analysis is a two-way conversation. I find some patterns, and we chat about them, hopefully you will say one of them is useful, or point me in a related direction, or even a completely new direction; the process is iterative.

The requirement that an anonymized form of the data be made public is likely to significantly reduce the offers I receive.

There is another requirement that I don’t say much about: the data has to be interesting.

What makes software engineering data interesting, or at least interesting to me?

There has to be lots of it. How much is lots?

Well, that depends on the kind of data. Many kinds of measurements of source code are generally available by the truck load. Measurements relating to human involvement in software development are harder to come by, but becoming more common.

If somebody has a few thousand measurements of some development related software activity, I am very interested. However, depending on the topic, I might even be interested in a couple of dozen measurements.

Some measurements are very rare, and I would settle for as few as two measurements. For instance, multiple implementations of the same set of requirements provides information on system development variability; I was interested in five measurements of the lines of source in five distinct Pascal compilers for the same machine.

Effort estimation data used to be rare; published papers sometimes used to include a table containing the estimate/actual data, which was once gold-dust. These days I would probably only be interested if there were a few hundred estimates, but it would depend on what was being estimated.

If you have some software engineering data that you think I might be interested in, please email to tell me something about the data (and perhaps what you would like to know about it). I’m always open to a chat.

If we both agree that it’s worth looking at your data (I will ask you to confirm that you have the rights to make it public), then you send me the data and off we go.

Performance of Java 2D drawing operations (part 3: image opacity)

Andy Balaam from Andy Balaam&#039;s Blog

Series: operations, images, opacity

Not because I was enjoying it, I seemed compelled to continue my quest to understand the performance of various Java 2D drawing operations. I’m hoping to make my game Rabbit Escape faster, especially on the Raspberry Pi, so you may see another post sometime actually trying this stuff out on a Pi.

But for now, here are the results of my investigation into how different patterns of opacity in images affects rendering performance.

You can find the code here: gitlab.com/andybalaam/java-2d-performance.

Results

  • Images with partially-opaque pixels are no slower than those with fully-opaque pixels
  • Large transparent areas in images are drawn quite quickly, but transparent pixels mixed with non-transparent are slow

Advice

  • Still avoid any transparency whenever possible
  • It’s relatively OK to use large transparent areas on images (e.g. a fixed-size animation where a character moves through the image)
  • Don’t bother restricting pixels to be either fully transparent or fully opaque – partially-opaque is fine

Opacity patterns in images

Non-transparent images drew at 76 FPS, and transparent ones dropped to 45 FPS.

I went further into investigating transparency by creating images that were:

  • All pixels 50% opacity (34 FPS)
  • Half pixels 0% opacity, half 100%, mixed up (34 FPS)
  • Double the size of the original image, but the extra area is fully transparent, and the original area is non-transparent (41 FPS)

I concluded that partial-opacity is not important to performance compared with full-opacity, but that large areas of transparency are relatively fast compared with images with complex patterns of transparency and opacity.

Numbers

Transparency and opacity

Test FPS
large nothing 90
large images20 largeimages 76
large images20 largeimages transparentimages 45
large images20 largeimages transparent50pcimages 34
large images20 largeimages transparent0pc100pcimages 34
large images20 largeimages transparentareaimages 41

Feedback please

Please do get back to me with tips about how to improve the performance of my experimental code.

Feel free to log issues, make merge requests or add comments to the blog post.