The Boost Interfaces Library for C++ by Jonathan Turkanis has now been officially announced on the Boost mailing list.

Writing tests before writing code is a key tenet of extreme programming: Write your tests before you write your code. I find myself violating this XP rule very often. A bit of psychology suggests that test-first development may actually stifle creative flow.

Automated tests can make demands on an API that are not made by any other client of the API. For example, you may find yourself wanting to add methods to a class that are not needed by any other, non-test clients. To what extent do you feel automated tests should be allowed change the API being tested?

What does this mean? Your nerdiness is: All hail the monstrous nerd. You are by far the SUPREME NERD GOD!!!

After my last blog, many megabytes on the precise definition of adaptation were posted to python-dev (search for "PEP-246"). Overwhelmed by the discussion, I'm going to propose a somewhat Solomonic alternative.

After hunting around and comparing options, I finally settled on CityDesk to author my news weblog. After using it for a few months I was pretty pleased with it, and gave it a qualified recommendation. But after it committed the unforgivable sin of silently deleting 1,000 words of text, I can no longer recommend it in good conscience.

Layering is a powerful architectural pattern. It can be more powerful when using your deployable units as layer boundaries.

Security professionals have long regarded agile development processes with suspicion, in spite of their reputation for improving software quality. I report on a panel discussion at JavaPolis confronting agile processes with security engineering.

When people think of code-reuse they usually think of function libraries, object hierarchies or cut-and-paste. A very powerful and too frequently overlooked method of code reuse is reuse of programs.

My two posts on adding optional static typing to Python have been widely misunderstood, and spurred some flames from what I'll call the NIMPY (Not In My PYthon) crowd. In this post I'm describing a scaled-down proposal with run-time semantics based on interfaces and adaptation.

What would a developer expect from a more agile C++?

Sometimes the roadblocks we encounter are our own.

I have written a new variant / union style type for C++ and posted it to CodeProject.com.

I'm curious, how many developers spend time consciously designing and managing relationships between physical entities?

On Dec. 23 I posted some thoughts about this topic, which received a record amount of feedback. Here's a follow-up, based on the responses as well as some thinking I did while off-line for the holidays.