I enjoyed reading Planning Extreme Programming by Kent Beck and Martin Fowler. I found the book to be an easy read and finished it in just a few days. Beck and Fowler are generous in their on-line writings and you can find a lot of information about agile process in various articles; however, I found [...]
I used to pair program now and then, but only for specific challenges. When I needed to implement a new feature in an unfamiliar area of the code, I might pair with the original author. I might collaborate on a particularly tricky algorithm or when we’re up against a tight deadline and it must [...]
Last night Wolfram Arnold and I gave a talk at the SF Ruby Meetup about a recent collaboration where we created specs, documentation and tests using cucumber to streamline workflow and communication between client and server engineers.
It was Wolf’s idea to start the talk with a role play of the real-life situation that we were [...]
John Sundman explores the question of whether the Internet will kill the feature length movie, and if it does, is that a fair trade-off? He references an earlier interview he did with Cory Doctorow where the answer to that question was assumed to be yes. Like John, I worry “about the wanton destruction of [...]
Rhomobile offers an open-source, ruby application framework. On the client-side, Rhodes allows you to build mobile applications on iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. The client app could be stand-alone or connected. On the server-side, enabling connected applications, RhoSync dramatically simplifies client-server data transfer.
I spent some time experimenting with it last [...]
Increasingly I interact with people I don’t know, or rather, don’t know in the real world. We interact through twitter, blog posts and comments, IRC and email. I start to feel like I know them, but I have never heard their voice or seen their face. These kind of interactions are becoming [...]
In the past month we took some first steps to inviting women into the SF Ruby community:
First Workshop was well attended with tremendous community support
Hack session (sponsored by Orange and Sustainable Websites) where many of the workshop attendees continued their learning; and women and men from the community brought their own projects to work [...]
After my recent ActiveScaffold post, I heard about several newer alternatives from Jaime Flournoy, Mike Gunderloy, and some more web surfing. I evaluated four plugins for admin UI, using the following methodology:
rails xxx_simple
cd xxx_simple/
./script/generate scaffold Task title:string notes:text complete:boolean
rake db:migrate
plus whatever annotations to the code the plugin needed. Then I [...]
The ActiveScafold plugin for Rails promises to be a huge time saver. In just a few easy steps, you can create a full web interface for your database, complete with inline editing and fold out panels. Of course, it helps to have some grasp about what it is doing or you can get stuck like [...]