mikelimasierra.net

Heating your home

Monday, 2. Mar 2026

I haven’t published anything in the last few years due to all the work in and around our new house, and there are half a dozen drafted articles waiting for me to finish them up. But the topic of this article is too important to leave idle. Municipal elections are coming up here, and many Germans have lots of wrong information about the various forms of heating, and the physics, economics and politics behind it. This is a massive problem, because the average heating unit in Germany has an expected lifetime of about twenty years. As a result, up to 50% of all the heating units in Germany will need to be replaced in the coming ten years, with the owners having to face the consequences of their… Continue Reading…

Software development

Time-lapse videos with a GoPro

Friday, 30. Dec 2022

I haven’t been able to do much coding this year, and my blogging frequency has also decreased dramatically. The reason for this is we bought an old crappy house, tore it down, and then built a new one. Almost all of my free-time is consumed by planning, organizing and doing stuff in and around the house. I’ve spent most of my summer with shovelling and moving earth, sand, dirt and aggregate and building things with concrete. Now that it’s winter, work is moving indoors, and I’ll be busy making furniture for the next few months. Fortunately, there was still an opportunity to write a little code, and it even involved the construction activities. The house we’ve built is of the prefabricated kind, and we’ve actually built two of… Continue Reading…

Software development • Software testing • TDD

Test-driven discipline

Wednesday, 20. Apr 2022

I’m going to hold an internal one-hour TDD training course tomorrow at work, and I plan to use this article as a reference. The majority of my co-workers has already taken part in a pretty great software craftsmanship training held by Kevlin Henney, so they should all be absolutely convinced of TDD. But understanding the value of TDD is not the issue here, making it work is. Therefore, I won’t tell people how great TDD is and why they should do it a lot more. Instead, I’ll give advice on how to stick with a test-driven approach without dropping efficiency, and possibly even more important, without losing your mind. I’ll do this by outlining the issues I had when I dipped my toes in the TDD pond. And… Continue Reading…

Software development

Singletons are not your enemy

Monday, 31. Jan 2022

The singleton design pattern ensures that a class can be instantiated once only. It provides easy access by means of a global operation that returns this single instance. Definition of the singleton design pattern A large portion of the programming community has recognized the singleton design pattern as an antipattern that is best avoided. This recognition is strong enough that most developers won’t touch a singleton with a ten-foot pole, even if their lives depend on it. I have a problem with most extreme opinions, mainly because they are usually quite wrong. And this is one of those, a pseudo truth that is being repeated over and over again like a prayer without questioning. Some high deity in the form of a prominent developer once spoke it out… Continue Reading…

Software development

Advanced weapons of mass construction

Wednesday, 15. Dec 2021

The creation of objects is one of the most popular topics in software development. It’s that popular because there is a vast range of possibilities and almost every road leads to Rome. But different projects have different needs, and the same is true for organizations and target audiences. Whatever works well in one spot may be either too complex or too crude in another, and here is where things get tricky. Developers have to have a good understanding of the requirements and how the code will eventually be used. And that has to happen before the actual object creation mechanism is planned and implemented. In the world of dotnet, the most common way of creating an object is calling a constructor. This is as simple as it gets,… Continue Reading…

Software development

Jobs and workflows

Monday, 11. Oct 2021

I have recently changed my job and there’s a lot to wrap my head around now. My new employer is about 250 times larger than my previous one, and apparently, there comes a lot of change with that size. For starters, I am now officially called a software architect. I did successfully complete a software architecture program in 2018 with my old employer, where I was also certified as a software architect, but my designation didn’t change, and I kept being an ordinary software developer. To be fair, this never even bothered me, since my job didn’t change at all with the certificate. If you work on client projects in a mid-size software house, you’re doing the full stack of the job anyway, and every one of your… Continue Reading…

Software development

Making mistakes: Part 4

Saturday, 7. Aug 2021

There can only ever be one common assembly, and it isn’t yours. This is my favourite, and it can be found in almost every bigger project. I’ve seen it with every single client without exception, and I’ve done it myself until a few years ago. Most of us know it as that dreadful assembly called Common, Core, Base, Internal or similar (I’ll use Common for the rest of this article). It’s also known as the dark spot in a project, that everybody is required to use and that nobody wants to touch. A place for coding horrors that just keeps on growing into a swamp of nightmares. Too graphical and exaggerated? It’s the place where developers like to put all the code that multiple components of a project… Continue Reading…

Software development

Making mistakes: Part 3

Saturday, 31. Jul 2021

Never underestimate a coder’s pride. I did that a few years back, when I joined a project with a new customer. The team consisted of four developers on site, led by a senior software architect and a group manager. Three more developers were also hired from another country to help create highly encapsulated features. This was the first customer project where I was presented with continuous integration, gated check ins, automated tests and code analysis tools like SonarQube. The software architect – let’s call him Stephen – had put a lot of effort into this development process, and he had done a really great job with it. Naturally, I was very enthusiastic about the project and I immediately felt that this was going to be great fun. We… Continue Reading…

Uncategorized

First words revisited

Sunday, 11. Jul 2021

My blog has been up and running for about an orca’s gestation period, so I think it’s time to check on the progress. In my first post, I mentioned some of my hopes and expectations. I also wrote that I’d come back to that to see what has worked out and what hasn’t, so here goes. The blog experiment has been a success so far. I’ve managed to write down quite a lot of things, which has freed up my mind a bit. There is still a lot of ground to cover, but it’s a start, and I’m glad I did it. I did manage to write a bunch of articles on work related topics, that I have successfully given to clients and co-workers as a sort of… Continue Reading…

Software development • Visual Studio

Making mistakes: Part 2

Thursday, 10. Jun 2021

Delete all your binaries before a release build. An incredibly easy way to mess up your project is forgetting to delete all your own binaries before building and testing a release candidate. It’s so easy to miss that most companies run dedicated build and test systems that enforce a clean environment before any meaningful action is taken. Not all developers can enjoy that kind of safety at work, and even less of us at home. But first, let’s go ahead and dig a little deeper into how Visual Studio treats assembly references, and why this is so important. There are three kinds of assembly references that I am aware of and each one has its specific behaviour. There is the project reference that we get a lot in… Continue Reading…