Wikipedia article

I Built His Cage (blog)

I Built His Cage is a blog about software development, engineering, and design, authored by MoffDub on the EIP web-ring. It is hosted on WordPress.com. It is noted^{[citation needed]} for its posts on object-oriented design issues and domain-driven design.

Contents

Influences
Format and Schedule
Notable Topics
Parodies
Features
1. Nowhere To Run
2. Helltime
See Also
References
External Links

Influences

I Built His Cage was started on April 27, 2008^[1] shortly after its author ended his part-time employment at The Company. The experiences of the author’s seminal development project, referred in posts as The Project^[21], influenced 11 of the first 14 posts and were the initial reason of the blog’s creation.

The blog’s name is borrowed from a cut scene from id Software‘s Doom 3 (2004). “I built his cage” are the last words uttered by missing scientist Dr. Ishii before the forces of Hell invade the UAC Mars base.^[2] The blog’s color scheme, as well as sections titles within many posts, are inspired by Doom 3 as well.

The writing style and use of contextual hyperlinks in posts are borrowed from MoffDub’s “blogging progenitor”^[3], Jeff Atwood, author of Coding Horror. Other elements, such as an “announcer” opening and closing each post, are borrowed from the sarcastic braggadocio of conservative radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh.

Format and Schedule

I Built His Cage is updated every Wednesday and Saturday with primary content. Wednesdays feature a new post on any range of software development topics, as chosen by MoffDub. They typically range anywhere from 600 to 1300 words and optionally feature diagrams and code snippets.

As of November 2008, Saturdays feature a new episode of a web comic called Nowhere To Run.

As of March 2009, every Monday and Friday offer a regular feature called Helltime.

Notable Topics

Abuse of getters and setters in OO languages: a frequent topic on the blog is the OOness of traditional getters and setters, namely their impact on the encapsulation of a set of classes. The author’s material on this topic ranges from initial discovery to patterns such as the Friend Class Pattern and Method Regulation to an examination of the human part of the issue.
Domain-driven design and reporting: part of the initial series of posts on The Project, this mini-series presented three different approaches to reconciling domain-driven design principles with the need for reporting and performance concerns.^[4][5][6]
Practical aspects of DDD: an ongoing topic is how to actually practice domain-driven design. Issues covered include re-use, anti-corruption layers, and lazy loading.

Parodies

During the 2008 U.S. elections, a parody campaign ad was posted citing the detriments of most code and extolling the benefits of a more OO/DDD style of coding.

On February 27, 2009, a parody song titled “Tar Pit Paradise” was posted, by “Mofflio”, set to the tune of “Gangsta’s Paradise.”

This page itself is a parody of Wikipedia.

Features

Nowhere To Run

On November 8, 2008, Nowhere To Run was announced as an online web-comic inspired by xkcd, Dilbert, and GeekHero with a comic strip titled Debugging. The series is published every Saturday, with exceptions^{[7][8][9][10]}. It is a stick figure comic and ranges between one and four panels.

Nowhere To Run derives its name from the speech given by Dr. Betruger in Doom 3‘s Hell level.^[11] The content and humor of the comic strips are partially derived from the author’s real world experiences in the development world. It is hand-drawn.

Recurring characters consist of:

the main character, who is unnamed and serves as the “straight man” it most strips. The unnamed nature of this character is a reference^{[citation needed]} to the Doom space marine, who is also unnamed.
Steve, the Procedural Programmer. This is a fellow developer of the main character. A certificate for a “Procedural Programmer Award” hangs in his cube. He is depicted as ignorant of object-oriented principles.^[12][19]
Wayne Henori, scrum master^[13][14]
Stanley, fellow developer^{[15][16][17][18]}

Helltime

On March 31, Helltime was started retroactively^[20] for March 30 as a “a twice-weekly sampling of various development-themed blog articles, news stories, and pages, with … commentary mixed in.” It is published every Monday and Friday and features three links to articles, blog posts, and pages on software. Commentary ranges from 200 to 350 words.

See Also

References

[1] – Goodbye cruel world!. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009
[2] – Mars City Underground. Visual Walkthroughs – Doom 3 Walkthrough. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[3] – Helltime for April 6. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[4] – Domain Driven Reports, Part 2. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[5] – Domain Driven Reports, Part 3. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[6] – Domain Driven Reports, Part 4. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[7] – Nowhere To Run: 20 – Chargeable. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[8] – Nowhere To Run: 14 – Scrum Board. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[9] – Nowhere To Run: 13 – Use Case. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[10] – Nowhere To Run: 2 – Sprint Zero. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.

[11] – Hell. Tim’s Doom 3 Page. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[12] – Nowhere To Run: 4 – Encapsulation Fail. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[13] – Nowhere To Run: 14 – Scrum Board. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[14] – Nowhere To Run: 17 – Team Name. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[15] – Nowhere To Run: 6 – transferAccessors. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[16] – Nowhere To Run: 9 – State Machine. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[17] – Nowhere To Run: 10 – Turing. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[18] – Nowhere To Run: 13 – Use Case. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[19] – Nowhere To Run: 15 – QuickFix. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[20] – Helltime for March 30. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.
[21] – Introducing The Project. I Built His Cage. Retrieved on 4-14-2009.

External Links

I Built His Cage