My First Track day...

On Monday I took my life into my hands and went on a track day at Bedford Autodrome with EasyTrack.co.uk.

I had a blast! The track was ideal for a novice and my car (an Audi TT RS) proved more than capable. I had asked for a session with an instructor and I got a great guy named Steve. In the end I took a second session in the afternoon. As a result I went from being slowest on the track to not being the slowest by a decent margin. There were some fabulous drivers on the track that day, the two sticking in my mind included one in a GT3 RS and an utter genius in a bog standard MX5.

I've included a photo that was taken by TrackPhoto.co.uk.

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The Height of Geekery

Well, here I am at my favourite cafe for breakfast with my iPad. I'm trying the whole blogging from my iPad thing with an app called BlogPress.

It's really interesting to see how modern integrated technology is making it feasible to do things that would have been awkward if not impossible a few years ago. The opportunities in this space are endless.

The excitement about the potential for location based services is well known. Unfortunately the excitement can obscure the real win. Location-less Services. The fact that I can start doing this kind of thing truly independently of my location is what's exciting. There have been some early mis-fires with the excitement of being able to take a laptop with you on holiday. Lugging a laptop though is really pretty hard work. We're on the cusp of being able to access and interact with the "datasphere" anywhere in the world.

This is where reading science fiction is a great advantage. Writers have been exploring how to use this for years. I feel that I am ready to make use of this and build on their thinking to go places that people who have not been reading will never think of.

How about you?

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Location:Cliffe High St,Lewes,United Kingdom

Constructor Versus Setter Based Dependency Injection

There seems to be two extreme camps here and no middle ground.

I, as usual, agree with neither extreme.

The simple fact is that my preferred approach is to design classes that meet the original intent of object orientation. That the class is fully usable after construction.

That is not to say that I believe that Constructor injection is the one, true way. Rather, I believe that all mandatory dependencies should be configured in the constructor and optional ones should be satisfied by setter methods. This makes the class much easier to understand. It also means that the constructor does not end up completely overloaded with parameters but neither are you left looking at a a sea of setter methods wondering which ones have to be used.

By using this convention the code becomes more self-documenting.