{"id":971,"date":"2010-01-19T23:32:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-20T04:32:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/?p=971"},"modified":"2023-12-20T16:25:18","modified_gmt":"2023-12-20T21:25:18","slug":"markus-squad-hows-refactor-my-code-belated-happy-holidays-im-not-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeconley.ca\/blog\/2010\/01\/19\/markus-squad-hows-refactor-my-code-belated-happy-holidays-im-not-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"MarkUs, Squad, How’s \/ Refactor My Code, Belated Happy Holidays, and Oh Yeah – I’m Not Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Belated happy holidays!<\/strong> My last post was over a month ago, and so my blog has a nice layer of web-dust on it right now.\u00a0 Well, here I am to ease your mind.\u00a0 I’m still alive!<\/p>\n

But that almost wasn’t true.<\/p>\n

I won’t bore you with the details – I’ll just give you the facts, and let you fill in the blanks.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. My girlfriend Em, her sister Cassie, and myself, were up in Collingwood on New Years Day, enjoying a relaxing day at a Norwegian spa<\/a> (the outdoor baths were amazing – how awesome is it to be in a boiling hot tub, while simultaneously, your hair is so frozen that it’s <\/em>snapping off in your hands<\/em>?)<\/li>\n
  2. The roads that night were treacherous.\u00a0 Snowy, un-plowed, and dark.\u00a0 I had borrowed my Mom’s car for the trip, and we took it realllllly slow.<\/li>\n
  3. <\/em>After a tortoise-paced two hour ride back to Em’s place in Newmarket, and then another two hour drive from Newmarket to my home in Grimsby the next day, I was getting pretty sick of winter driving.\u00a0 On top of that, the brakes seemed to be acting funny.\u00a0 I found myself sliding a lot, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of resistance when I put my foot down.<\/li>\n
  4. The next day, my Mom takes the car to go to work.\u00a0 She doesn’t even leave the drive-way.\u00a0 The brakes hadn’t been acting funny:\u00a0 the brakes hadn’t been acting at all<\/em>.\u00a0 Turns out we had a leaky brake-line for the entire trip…<\/li>\n
  5. Guts of the story:\u00a0 I think we drove home from Collingwood with about 35% brake power in one of the worst snow storms I’ve ever driven in.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Breakfast tasted especially good for us that morning.<\/p>\n

    Anyhow, now where was I?\u00a0 Oh yeah…<\/p>\n

    MarkUs<\/h3>\n

    MarkUs<\/a> 0.6 got kicked out a week or so ago.\u00a0 The MarkUs Team kicked the crap out of a bunch of tickets over the holidays, and I think we ended up with a pretty solid release.\u00a0 MarkUs is being used again at UofT this semester, and Byron Weber Becker<\/a> is also piloting it at UWaterloo.\u00a0 I’ll cautiously say that things seem to be going well for this release.\u00a0 Great job, MarkUs Team!<\/p>\n

    I’m TAing the students working on MarkUs for Greg’s<\/a> UCOSP course<\/a> again.\u00a0 We had a fantastic code-sprint this past weekend!\u00a0 The new team members have already started working on tickets and submitting code to review.\u00a0 I think we’re on our way into another highly productive semester.<\/p>\n

    A Few More Web-Based Code Review Tools<\/h3>\n

    Remember that big list of code review tools I put up a while back<\/a>?\u00a0 I’ve got a few more to add:<\/p>\n

    How’s My Code<\/h4>\n

    This is a pretty dead-simple code review tool that came about during a Rails Rumble a few months back<\/a>.\u00a0 It has that “big friendly buttons and round corners” web 2.0 thingy going on.\u00a0 I haven’t gone so far as to actually try it out, but I did watch this web-cast:<\/p>\n

    <\/object><\/p>\n

    Not bad if you just want to get your code out there, and get your team commenting on your changes…<\/p>\n

    A few things caught my attention:<\/p>\n