The dynamic programmer
Methodology
DevOps and the benefits that spawn from it are undeniable, but I'm worry we (the industry) is pushing it in the wrong way.
On why libraries are here to stay and, at the same time, is good to remember the power of pure JS.
For the last year or so I have been practicing a variety of techniques with different degrees of success. I found a recipe in the last four or five months that seems to work well so far, a mix of GTD, Inbox zero and the Pomodoro technique.
This is a post on communication, on how developers and technically savvy people think in general and the differences with the archetypical user. Two weeks ago I brought a Kobo.
I pick up the book with a lot of interesting an enthusiasm. My goals were to learn techniques and proper ways to write down user stories, improve my estimation techniques and been able to apply some of those techniques back at work.
Last Friday I was showing some of the guys at the office how to write user stories with the Gherkin language to been able to use them in either Cucumber or Specflow as executable specifications.
This is a very short book on a great practice for any agile team. The book walk you through a lot of techniques an exercises that will help you and your team to have successful retrospectives.
On my new project I want to start using end to end testing. The idea is to write an specification run it against an outer interface. Gui, Web service, etc. It fails. So you start implementing the feature using TDD until the Spec pass.
Probably you are aware of Edgecase Ruby Koans. In case you aren't, let me introduce you to them.
Since I started using Git a few months ago, and particularly GitHub since last September, my life have been good in DVCS land.I used to be a Subversion user and I was happy*, maybe because I didn't know anything better.
I try to be pragmatic in my approach to development and one of the things that change the most are the tools I use to deliver software. There are several reasons why I change tools so often.
I have been playing at home for the last few days with different migrations strategies for db development. The one that I like the most so far is Migrator.Net. Here are the things I really like.
You can get all the videos (110)
If your team is comprised by more than one developer you should have some coding guidelines and standards in place. (I can make the case to have this guidelines even if you code along but that can be another post).
InfoQ has a video recorded at JAOO on witch Robert Martin talks about craftsmanship and ethics on software development.
Stefan Tilkov is one of the guys behind the fabulous info.com and is a big REST proponent. The talk is titled REST, an alternative to Web Services.
I try to practice TDD most of the time these days. I don't write new code without a test first. A few years ago write the test first was something that I understood from an intellectual point of view but it sounded impractical.
My previous post got me thinking, what are the things I will considered as minimum requirements for me to work in a project even when I have serious constrains on time?
Derick Bailey is doing a very good series on Kanban. So far he posted about- The board, queues, order points, pipelines, handling bugs and emergency fixes. You can find all the posts under the Kanban tag. ...
Igor Brejc with a set of valid points when implementing Continuous Integration.
Mohammad Azam has a post entitled When Being Agile Kills the Project. He mentions a project were the client gave a one month deadline not negotiable and so, he had to go and start cutting corners to make the deadline ...
We have been looking forward to implement Kanban for a while and after a few delays we put the board up today. We decided to define our pipeline using five columns.
Lava lamps, Orbs, led displays, they all have been used and are still being used to show the build status of projects under Continuous Integration. What about using a big flat panel TV? Cruise Control provides information via xml ...
There is a nice video on Channel 9 about a study done by Microsoft Research about TDD and it's impact on a real industry scenario. The study was done post mortem, so the developers were not influenced while developing the product.
They talk about LINQ and the changes needed to support it in c#. There is a very interesting point on Extension methods a feature that fascinate myself and scare me a little bit. It's so cool that I know that we will overuse it at the beginning.
InfoQ published some videos for sessions at Agile 2008. Agile 2008 was held here in Toronto two weeks ago and I participate as a volunteer. It was a great experience and the variety and quality of the talks was really good.
In my previous post I show how to integrate PartCover reports into CC.Net and promise to look into make the reports look a bit nicer and try to integrate the Coverage metrics into the statistics reports. So I dust off my xslt ...
A few months ago I mentioned that I was using PartCover.Net to measure test coverage in my projects. I have been really busy but I decided that this week I was going to integrate the reports with CC.Net. Cruise Control ships with NCover support o...
A free tool to do code coverage with a nice GUI for the developers to use, that can be run on the command prompt, that generates nice xml based reports (to integrate with your CC server) and best of all for me) that works fine with Static methods...
I have been working in different companies where the practice of an Agile methodology is in place, but in most of them the part that is always left behind is pair programming and/or code review.