Jan 05
On a recent healthcare start-up team, it grew from my buddy (who moved on after 6 months or so) and I, to a handful of developers/sub-contractors. Here is how we tried to make it fairly efficient. We just started tracking what was needed, getting feedback as each new developer went through the process, and improving …
Apr 22
Code like this: unless nodes.nil? nodes.first else return end Can be written using the seemingly more elegant approach with this ruby trick: node = nodes.first rescue return But then, that got me to thinking… In many languages I have used in the past (e.g., Java and C++), Exception handling is an expensive endeavor. So, …
Mar 06
there was some discussion over on the cucumber list about manual testing. cucumber is great at BDD, but it doesn’t mean it is the only test technique (preaching to choir) we should use. i have learned it is critical to understand where automated tests shine, and where human testing is critical — and to not …
Mar 02
Somehow, moving a perfectly happy production app to Rackspace and nginx caused URLs to no longer sport the SSL ‘s’ in “https” — bummer. Link_to’s were fine… But a custom “tab_to” (responsible for highlighting the current tab) was not so happy (even though it used an eventual link_to). Turns out, that it is the url_for …
Feb 19
This particular application has been collecting data for months now, but hasn’t really had any users by design. At 33GB of data, pulling up a list of messages received was taking f-o-r-e-v-e-r! So I decided to document how to go about and fix a running production system… Hope it helps. Log into mongo console and …
Jan 27
Let’s try a little Bizarro1 test (if you agree to these, I’ll poke you with a hot krypton stick): We are uncovering better ways to provide the illusion of developing software by listening to others talk about watching people try. Through this (dare I call it?) work, we have come to value: Dogmatic process and …
Jan 11
Had some recent discussions on the subject of using tools or just sticky notes… for me, a digital board representation of the kanban style 3-column view is merely one v-e-r-y small aspect of using something like jira. though i could probably live with just post-it notes, i bet it would be an interesting challenge for …
Jan 04
For the past few years, I have been bothered by a nagging urge to write a pamphlet on software titled “Common Sense” — an homage to Thomas Paine’s great work. This may be a stretch, and I may counter this point once I actually try and research and draw more parallels — or not. So …
Oct 01
A friend of mine had an interesting situation: Novel product, many unknowns Multiple teams grouped into 3 product areas Experience doing 3-week sprints Only a fool would do anything other than the 30-day official sprint cycle that I saw on some website and in a few books. (Just kidding. Unfortunately, like most of agile development, …
Sep 26
Got a very nice “blast from the past” contact (4 levels deep) on LinkedIn. Scott was a member of a team where we went through object modeling for their business application. The reason I wanted to contact you was two fold: First for some reason that training has stuck with me more that many trainings …
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