Asus Zen Ultrabook First Impressions
Last week a received a new Asus UX31E Zenbook Ultrabook laptop computer, which I’ve been putting through the paces. I’d like to write up my thoughts on the unboxing and my initial impression of the machine, …
Blog Posts
MANY articles on a wide array of topics. You’ll find a lot of my newer content is going to my YouTube channel first, but I do still blog occasionally.
About Steve Smith (aka ardalis)
What’s an Ardalis? I pronounce Ardalis ar-DAL-us, but you’re welcome to pronounce it however you like. I started using it as my online username in the 90s because shockingly any consistent variation of …
Unit Test or Integration Test and Why You Should Care
There remains a fair bit of confusion about what constitutes which kind of test. Many developers are fairly new to testing, and tend to call any tests of their code " unit tests" even when they're dealing with something …
Run Your Unit Tests in Parallel to Maximize Performance
If you're at all serious about testing, at some point you're going to have a rather large suite of tests that need to run, and you'll find that your builds are taking longer than you would like because of how long the …
Getting Started with Kanban
Kanban is a system for improving existing production processes. Learn more about the process, and how to get started applying it, in this brief overview.
Represent Behavior with Classes not Flags
When designing your software systems, favor the use of classes to model behavior within the system over the overuse of flags in your data model. The resulting design will be more flexible, less tightly coupled, and …
View HTML Source of Email in GMail and Google Apps
How to view the actual HTML source of an email in Gmail using Show Original and decoding base64 content for testing email templates.