Many industries need to evidence that code reviews have taken place. This is typical in regulated environments like Banking but the Regulators aren’t clear what constitutes a good source code review process and don’t yet understand modern practices like Pair Programming. They can’t help you streamline your process.

The result is a tension between old-fashioned bureaucracy and modern development practices; the need to prove you have a rigorous process in-place and the desire to push frequent releases to production without wasteful paperwork.

Level up the way you distribute your Java/Scala/Kotlin applications by packaging them as .deb files and deploying via apt.

Upgrade your Raspbian install from Stretch to Buster. This is basically the same procedure as upgrading Jessie to Stretch that I covered previously.

I recently created a free place online to collect training materials and videos around eXtreme Programming. I’m creating or curating a set of live workshops, check it out at https://xpdojo.org.

The first video on the site gives an introduction to refactoring and some examples in Java from chapter 1 of Martin Fowler’s book. The source code is on GitHub.

Upgrade your Raspbian install from Jessie to Stretch.

Here’s some common things to do when you first setup a Pi.

Type classes provide ad-hoc inheritance which means that we can use them to create polymorphic functions that can be applied to arguments of different types. This is a fancy way of saying that we can create common behaviour for classes without resorting to traditional (extends) polymorphism.

From the Neophytes Guide, Daniel Westheide describes type classes, slightly paraphrased, as follows.

Using a Raspberry Pi Zero, some cheap components and some custom software, you can build a data logger to track ambient temperature in your home for around £10. Track days, weeks and months worth of temperature data and display some pretty graphs via the web.

Pi specific instructions to disable the LED on the Edimax EW-7811UN USB wireless adapter.

Without an ethernet port, the Pi Zero doesn’t lend itself to being setup without a monitor and keyboard. This post shows how to configure your wifi using the Adafruit console lead without having to plug in a monitor or keyboard.

The Adafruit Console Lead uses the PL2303TA (a USB-to-serial/parallel converter chip) to talk to the Pi over GPIO pins 8 and 10 via USB. You can use this kind of USB to serial communication on plenty of devices but with the Pi, it’s handy to use the screen application to effectively open a “telnet-like” terminal to your Pi.