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martinnormark | 11 years ago | on: The Best Code Documentation ‘Tool’ Ever Made

I only test against the final result, that I expect any public method to produce. The unit test should pay no consideration to the implementation details such as private methods.

If you want to test the fragments in isolation, split it out into a separate class that you use as a dependency. Your desire to do so is often a good indication that you should split up the responsibility.

martinnormark | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: how to work faster when building a product?

Perfection is a trap during the early stage of a product. Get it out there, in hands of paying customers!

Perfection is the enemy of execution.

Honestly, how proud would perfect icons make you if your product didn't resonate with anyone, and you didn't get any customers within the first month? 2 months? 3 months?

Remember that you can improve week after week after week, once you've launched and you get feedback that indicates what customers want. Then you can improve the right things, which is very important.

martinnormark | 11 years ago | on: A New Bike Lane That Could Save Lives and Make Cycling More Popular

Interesting stats.

Another advantage for cyclists is "right on red". Even though it's illegal, a lot of people does it. Sometimes the car lane to turn right is packed and you have to wait several intervals for you to turn right, and the cyclists just pass by.

The roads are small, especially compared to the US. And there're just too many cars!

martinnormark | 11 years ago | on: How Apple Cheats

Amazing. Thanks, I didn't know of him specifically but I do remember seeing his book somewhere.

martinnormark | 11 years ago | on: How Apple Cheats

This reminds me of how Microsoft added specific code to Windows 95 to ensure SimCity would run.

This is from Joel Spolsky's Strategy Letter II: Chicken and Egg Problems http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000054.html

So Windows 3.x on Intel 80386s was the first version that could run multiple DOS programs respectably. (Technically, Windows 386 could too, but 80386s were rare and expensive until about the time that Windows 3.0 came out.) Windows 3.0 was the first version that could actually do a reasonable job running all your old software.

Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

martinnormark | 12 years ago | on: 80 — Trip logging on your iPhone

You're making a valid point, thank you very much for the feedback.

I added "Keep track of your driving and export your trips when you need to file expense reports, do your taxes or other deductions", instead of the secondary "sign up" message.

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