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Archive for the ‘Still-coding’ Category

Why SVN Still Makes Sense for Most Development Teams

Posted in History, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , , , on December 23, 2025| Leave a Comment »

After retiring 15 years ago from professional software development, I had a clear picture of what source control should provide for a commercial development team:

  • Prevention of simultaneous edits – avoiding the chaos when two developers unknowingly work on identical code
  • Real-time visibility into who’s currently working on what files
  • Version metadata embedded in code files – a lifesaver when you find a piece of code and need to know what version it is
  • A comprehensive audit trail showing who modified which files and when
  • Automatic version incrementing for every modification
  • A single authoritative codebase representing the current production state
  • The ability to roll back to any previous version

When a business opportunity pulled me out of retirement and back into managing a development team, I naturally asked about source control. The universal response? “We use Git.”

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Converting a database from CouchDB to Mongodb

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 28, 2025| Leave a Comment »

When I began the project I am currently working on (more details will be provided next month – probably), it was initially intended as a small test to determine the capabilities of AI.  Over the last six months it has turned into something that we might take further. 

But I hit a problem. As a little hobby project I chose the database I really really like – CouchBD.  CouchDB is elegant, simple yet very functional and efficient. Close to the perfect database management system (DBMS).  But to take it further I need to involve other developers and it turs out that CouchDB skills are few and far between. Truly it is the Betamax of DBMSs.

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More adventures with AI

Posted in ai, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , on January 20, 2025| Leave a Comment »

My previous blog post outlines my success in converting a data structure definition from one format to another. Both ChatGTP and Gemini had a really good stab at it. The result was mainly accurate and extra information had been added for me. ChatGTP managed to make a mistake on the second attempt at the task, and when I asked it why, it used a completely made-up (and incorrect) rule about SQL Databases as an excuse. So Turing Test passed!

I gave it another task. Convert a routine from using the SQLite3 data base management system, to the higher performance MySQL. This is a straightforward, if tedious task. How did it do?

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AI to the rescue – Part 2.

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, Technology, tagged , , , , , , on January 11, 2025| Leave a Comment »

In a previous post I showed how an AI system (ChatGPT) was an easy way of converting an SQL Schema to a JSON-Schema. It was very successful and could save hours of donkey-work when dealing with a legacy database. I am coding in TypeScript so I asked for a TypeScript schema as well. It also did that perfectly.

I asked Gemini to do the same job.

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AI to the rescue

Posted in Database Management Systems, Still-coding, tagged , , , , , on January 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

I have been working on my hobby project, which is a generic database updating tool. It uses an extension of the JSON-Schema standard. But how do you deal with a new database from a legacy database.

I found a really simple solution, I asked ChatGTP to produce a JSON-Schema based on a database dump – which happily is a set of SQL statements.

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Do you use AI to find bugs?

Posted in Still-coding, tagged , on November 19, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I came back to my lockdown project (which was a data maintenance program that works with several databases) and decided to port it to Windows. This is because my Unix box went belly-up. Also I needed to exercise my brain.

A couple of times now I have copied and pasted code into Microsoft’s Co-Pilot and asked what is wrong. Both times it has come back with the answer.

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My take on Python and other languages

Posted in History, Still-coding, tagged , , on February 11, 2024| Leave a Comment »

I have been using JavaScript (Node) for the last few years, but I have pretty much come to the end of my hobby project. I see that Python is very popular for server side systems., so I thought would take a look.

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What is up with Apple

Posted in Still-coding, tagged on December 3, 2023| 1 Comment »

The last Apple product I had was an Apple II back in the last century. So I don’t have a login to Apple (an Apple ID). But when I bought a PC from Currys, it came with 3 free months of Apple TV. I always wanted to see Slow Horses, so figured I would take them up on this. But I had to get an Apple ID first.

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Let’s try Python

Posted in Still-coding, tagged on October 16, 2023| Leave a Comment »

For some reason I can’t understand, Python is the second most popular language out there1 At first glance the language doesn’t look promising. One complaint about COBOL was that you could screw up a program by an unwanted period. With Python it just takes a space. But I shouldn’t condemn the language because of a brief glance at the Python website. So I thought I would give it a shot. More recently I have been experimenting with Node, so that is my baseline

Here is my progress to date.

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IT Pioneers: Structured Design (circa 1974) – the cornerstone of modern coding practice

Posted in IT Pioneers, Still-coding, tagged , , , , on August 5, 2023| Leave a Comment »

I learned to code in 1963. Things were different then.

There were some obvious things, like 24 hour turnarounds on tests, and storing code on paper tape. Oh – and the computer had about .000000001 of the processor speed on my watch, but at the time we thought it was pretty cool.

I am beginning to sound like one of the four yorkshiremen so I will move on. I want to talk about the pioneers of structured programming and structured design,

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