T-shirt Update

I love t-shirts and keep wearing them regardless of my employer's dress code. I had only two complaints about them in the last year, so things worked out quite well ;-) The last time I wrote about Code Cop t-shirts was more than two years ago, so it is definitely time for an update.

Don't Repeat Yourself
The Don't Repeat Yourself or DRY principle states that every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system. In simple terms this means that there should be no duplicates or repetition. The dark blue DRY shirt reminds me to write things once and only once. It is also my best selling shirt ever, as a friend bought one after he was exposed to horrible duplicated code at the client's site. Unfortunately I did not get rich as I bought him a beer in return.

Keep the bar green to keep the code clean
Keeping the bar green is the primary motto of JUnit, the popular unit-testing framework for Java. This grey shirt displays a simplified image of the Eclipse JUnit runner together with a green bar. I had problems finding the right dimensions for the characters and the green check marks and threw away at least three versions until I got it right. One day I wore it in the office and one of my colleagues, a project manager, asked me "green is good, right?" I just love them.

Red-Green-Refactor
Red-Green-Refactor is the cycle of Test Driven Development. You write a failing test which results in a red bar. Then you write some code until the bar is green. Finally you clean up the code you just wrote, e.g. improve the names or remove duplication. (Remember DRY?) For the white shirt I used typefaces according to these phases: Red is scary, I do not like it, so I used a Halloween typeface for it. Then I go for a green bar as fast as possible, so I used a dynamic typeface for that. My result after refactoring is sorted and tidy symbolized by a regular typeface.

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T-shirts, T-shirts, T-shirts

My Personal Branding
Here it is - finally - the official Code Cop T-shirt. In fact it's not just a shirt, but a whole series of variations: There is a black on blue version that has proper contrast and one with a navy-coloured logo which is a bit more discreet.


My favourite one is the cosy version of the blue 'Code Cop' shirt. The large logo on the front and the URL on the back are produced using Flock Print. There is a female version - I just don't know when to stop! They all look great and I had each of them produced and sent to me to inspect.


More Freaky
Who needs such T-shirts? Well, geeks need cool shirts and Jeff has one, too. If you like freaky shirts as much as I do, then you will probably love my coding related quotes shirts. I like to use (more or less) ingenious quotes to bother my colleagues with either small advice or mild criticism. One of my favourite quotes for crappy but fast developed code is Uncle Bob's "rushingtogetawholebunchofshitcodedandsortofrunning". Wearing this shirt you don't even have to say it out loud. ;-)


Talking of coding: What's your favourite design pattern? Mine is the Singleton pattern. No, I'm joking, I hate it. Alex Miller hates it too and explained some time ago why it's so hateful. (At my previous working place one third of all classes was dependant on singletons. It was awful.) I can't stand them. I'm getting sick when I see one. Therefore I'm sure that Singletons Are Evil.


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About the Code Cop

Three weeks ago I attended the eJug Days in Vienna. It was a little conference with some nice presentations. I hadn't been to a conference for some time and was highly motivated. At the end of one particularly cool talk, when the speaker showed his last slide containing the address of his personal web site, a thought hit me. "Man", I thought, "I should have some nice web page with all my stuff put together in one place." This should save my job from going to India ;-) This was the beginning of Code Cop dot org.

I am a senior developer and have been working with Java and internet related technologies since 1999. And I am a completionist. I like my code being in order, e.g. nicely formatted, readable, proper named, designed, tested etc. In fact I am fanatic about it, sometimes even forced to keep it neat. For example a colleague calls me to his place to discuss some problem and I spot some minor flaw in the code on the screen, e.g. he wrote static public instead of public static. I'm getting mad. I am unable to listen to him till the flaw is fixed. I can tell you it's a vice. (And rumours are that there are colleagues who write such crap on purpose, just to tease me.) I don't know if it's the impact of my Virgo ascendant or the beginning of some weird mental disorder. But I do know that studying Mathematics and doing research work did not help to be less freaky.

I started working on code quality in 2004. While staying with Herold Business Data I was responsible for the code quality of the Online Services, running the Daily Build with Apache Ant and loads of tools. There, after years of harassing my dear colleagues with code and daily build issues, I was officially appointed "Code Cop" in 2006 (and even called a "Code Nazi" once). Later I published some articles about being a Code Cop :-). Now I moved all my QA related stuff from different sources here and will add all things I have not published yet.

Like Why the Lucky Stiff I'm an "aspiring author with no true achievements under my belt". I am interested in code quality tools, code generation techniques and recently in dynamic languages like Ruby or Scala. I have a PhD in mathematical computer science (a mixture of Applied Mathematics and Computer Sciences) from the university of technology in Vienna. I live in Austria.

Licence
Scott Hanselman gives advice to license your blog: All the content provided on code-cop.org is Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licensed (short CC 3.0 BY), except noted otherwise. That says you can share or remix the work as long as you attribute the original work to me. Note that some images might have a different licence. For code I usually use the New BSD License.

Credits
It's time to thank some people for their help: Christoph Kober (Polychrom) for the cool Code Cop logo you see above on the right. Back in grammar school he already made the fanciest drawings. Claudia Gillmeier (Aurian) for her help with the design and layout. Stefan Nestelbacher designed my first T-shirt back in 2006. Further thanks to Douglas Bowman (Minima Stretch template), Mike Samuel (Prettify), phydeaux3 (Tag Cloud) and all the folks at Flickr for releasing their images under the creative commons licence. I just love your images. Keep going! Last but not least I want to thank my significant other Kasia for proofreading and supporting me in setting up this site.