Good Stuff is another “family of sites” project. Still in development and design, it will serve as a clearinghouse for live music in a given metropolitan area. The project has started small, covering Houston, Galveston, and Beaumont TX, but after the alpha and beta periods are over, it will expand to cover a set of [...]

The GearBase Project is an elegant solution to an age-old problem: If you were forced to identify, specifically, “stuff” you had in your home, your studio, your rehearsal space–could you do it? Still have those ownership records handy? Know the serial numbers to your Kurzweil or your Marshall amp or your horn? No, I didn’t [...]

BCT is a consortium of musicians who happen to also be deeply involved in technology. Or, vice versa. Their goal is to offer assistance to community musicians and ensembles worldwide with quality, low-cost (free, whenever possible) web applications which assist these organizations in the care and feeding of running a non-profit group. A partner site, [...]

Are you a fad-follower?  Do you always use the latest new development environment simply because it’s this year’s model?  Here’s my axiom: Application architecture is less than optimum if it dogmatically conforms to a trendy framework at the cost of following good design/implementation practices. For example, is it correct to be inflexible and use private [...]

Code should be easy to read. Code should be convenient to read, not convenient to write. There are several things involved here. Choosing good names that are self-explanatory is a good place to start. Strive for simple solutions, even if they are more verbose or inefficient. Whether inefficiency is a problem won’t be known until [...]

OK, so you decide to add tests to your code. That typically isn’t so easy. The odds are that your code wasn’t designed and/or implemented to be easily testable. That means you will have to make changes to it to make it testable without breaking any of it (this is usually called refactoring these days). [...]

Does your code work?  How do you know?  Can you prove it? If you don’t have tests for your code, it sucks. And I mean comprehensive, fine grained, programmer tests (aka something like unit tests), as well as higher level functional and integration tests. Tests that are automated. Tests that are run routinely. With the [...]