Ben E. C. Boyter

Mutation testing is a technique used to verify that tests are providing value.

In the beginning of my software development career I was interviewing for an intern position at Microsoft.

A few of the talks I have given and the slide desks are included below.

Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield (pictured) managed to embarrass me in front of my peers once.

searchcode is a source code and documentation search engine.

A test is considered flaky or flakey if it if fails occasionally.

Below is an implementation of an extremely clean data access pattern possible using C# and Entity Framework.

One benefit that is generally not talked about when discussing testing is the following.

Testing is software engineering is a method of providing information about code quality when developing a piece of software.

There is a great deal of argument in the testing community over how to label tests.

Software sanity tests are closely associated with smoke tests.

Just a quick update to searchcode.

Just a quick post to list some updates to searchcode.com The first is a slight modification to the home page.

A few days ago there was a lack of speakers for #SyPy which is the Sydney Python meet-up held most months and sponsored by Atlassian.

One of the most annoying things I deal with is XML documents with invalid characters inside them.

TL/DR: Regular expressions are fast, until they aren’t.

As I mentioned in the previous entry I had started work on a new project I called portfold.

Every few years I have a habit of starting a new project.

The recent surge in attention to searchcode from the Windows 9/10 naming fiasco resulted in a lot of questions being raised about searchcode’s policy about free software (open source).

Found the following comment in some code I had modified a few years ago.

About a month ago searchcode.com managed to sit on the front page of Hacker News (HN) for most of a day and produced a lot of useful feedback for me to act on.

Since I am still bringing all my content together I thought I would pull in this post from Quora asking what is special about DuckDuckGo.

Aditya Dwivedi recently did an interview with me about searchcode.

There is a rather nice blog post on the Sphinx Search blog about how searchcode uses sphinx.

If you run Sphinx Search you may want to estimate the amount of RAM that it requires in order to per-cache.

There seems to be a general trend with calling the new release of your search engine next (see Iconfinder and DuckDuckGo), and so I am happy to announce and write about searchcode next.

There has been a lot of coverage recently about a chat-bot “Eugene Goostman” passing a variance of the Turing test by convincing 30% of the testers that it was indeed a human by posing as Ukrainian 13 year old boy (to make misspellings and grammar mistakes

I have been doing a lot of work with the Sitecore CMS recently.

Ever wanted to implement a distinct over a custom object list in C# before?

This is a follow on piece to my 5 part series about writing a search engine from scratch in PHP which you can read at http://www.boyter.org/2013/01/code-for-a-search-engine-in-php-part-1/ I get a lot of email requests asking how to setup Phindex on a new…

Since I wrote the code to these snippets I thought I may as well add them here in case I ever need them again or want to review them.

Another day another interview.

Since I have been working on searchcode for a while and its getting close to being ready for release (a few weeks away at this point I predict) I thought I would post a teaser screenshot.

Being in the job market again I been doing quite a few tests.

Another comment I posted over on the TechZing Podcast.

Without adding a git commit hook I wanted to be able to check if my Python code conformed to pep8 standards before committing anything.

This piece of content is taken from a comment I left on the TechZing podcast blog.

Just a quick post to show off the new searchcode.com logo.

The worst program I ever worked on was something I was asked to maintain once.

This is something that took me 2 years or so to learn.

Its a real pain when you want to inspect the files, delete or copy them.

The following is taken from my response to a Hacker News comment.

01/02/05 – 14/01/05 Well I figured I may as well add an end of the story, I believe that anyone who reads this deserves and end to the story and hence I am writing this for you all.

3/11/04 – 5/11/04 Let me recap the conversation I had with Tiff on the 5th over the phone.

Everything below is from when I was in University and went on exchange to Heilongjiang University in Harbin China.

Since I am pulling most of my content from other sites such as Mahalo and Quora I thought I would pull back some of my more interesting HN comments.

The following I posted on Quora in response to the question “I am planning to make a small scale search engine on my local system, but I don’t know from where to start?”.

Introducing the first beta release of SingleBugs, the bug tracker aimed at single/solo developers.

This serves as the announcement of my new bug tracker product I am working on.

I was looking for this on Google the other day and unable to find it.