Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 09/01/2010
Here at Relevance, we're committed to the idea of working in pairs.
But as the company grows beyond its Durham headquarters, we have more
and more people working outside of the office. Pairing is hard enough
by itself, but pairing remotely is daunting. This post documents some
of the software and processes we've tried.
Being a Mac-heavy office, we started with iChat and its screen-sharing
feature. This is quick and easy, and works fairly well for brief use.
But several... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 09/01/2010
Both MongoDB and CouchDB are document-oriented datastores. They both work with JSON documents. They both are usually thrown into the NoSQL bucket. They’re both hip. But that’s where the similarities, for the most part, stop.
When it comes to queries, both couldn’t be any more different. CouchDB requires pre-defined views (which are essentially JavaScript MapReduce functions) and MongoDB supports dynamic-queries (basically what you’re used to with normal... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 08/31/2010
Some teams don’t do demos at the end of their iterations. Many of the teams who don’t do demos also have trouble finishing all the stories they committed to at the beginning of the iteration. They continue, iteration to iteration, not always finishing, not getting to releaseable at the end of the iteration. And, sometimes, these teams don’t do retrospectives because they are not done.
There’s significant value in a demo at the end of the iteration.
The demo... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/30/2010
Earlier, we posted that we were seeking some new PMs for the Relevance team. At that time, I mentioned that we were always looking for great technical folk as well. I think that deserves its own post.
Our team is growing pretty fast. Our combination of technology platforms and deep devotion to the people side of software is resonating really well with our customers and we want to encourage and enable that growth. So what are we looking for? I'm glad you asked.
Are you... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/29/2010
New point releases, new projects, and more info about the first clojure-conj. Here are The Relevant Bits from last week's "20%" time:
Lots of planning and organization on the (first clojure-conj). This is an event you are not going to want to miss! We will be unveiling the fruits of this labor later this week. Keep a close eye on the website for more information.
David released Incanter 1.2.3.
Jared released Errbit, the open source error catcher that's Hoptoad API compliant.... more »
Posted by:
Matthew McCullough
on 08/29/2010
North Carolina
This week, I made a four day journey to the very forested state of North Carolina. Joey knew a Coloradoan was coming and turned on the statewide AC to bring it down to a comfortable 72 degrees Fahrenheit when I landed. The food was great, the people were super, and the technology was awesome.
Relevance
I had an open invitation to come out and visit the team at Relevance, which I’d been waiting to cash in. The Research Triangle NFJS Symposium finally made that... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 08/25/2010
I have been delinquent for those of you who subscribe to my email newsletter. I have not published one since April. On the other hand, I just posted Park Projects You Can’t Staff, For Now. The next newsletter is scheduled for Thursday morning. In case you’re wondering, I post the most immediate past newsletter when I queue one up for sending. If you decide to subscribe, you can rest assured I will not bombard you with email!
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Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 08/24/2010
Cédric Beust has an interesting blog post entitled “Clojure, concurrency and silver bullets” where he takes issue with the notion that Clojure can yield code that
is multithread safe and it will automatically scale.
Cédric goes on to state that the concurrency problem doesn’t need a new language as
hundreds of thousands of lines written in C, C++, C#, Java and who knows what other non functional programming languages are running concurrently, and... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/23/2010
Here at Relevance, we use Hoptoad for tracking exceptions in our Rails apps. It's great because it gives us a heads up when something goes wrong but it doesn't bury us with tons of email. So, when we found out we couldn't use it on one of our client's apps due to firewall and data confidentiality requirements, we were naturally upset, but we worked around it.
We ended up using a mix of Chatterbox and CapGun to track exceptions and deployments. While this works great, it requires a bit... more »
Posted by:
Matthew McCullough
on 08/23/2010
I’m excited to be presenting at the Rich Web Experience this December. It’ll be a great show, but the venue location simply adds to the magnetism. Who can resist beaches and Florida in December?
I’ll be doing a sharpened version of my iOS workshop with Ben Ellingson. Attendance numbers will be greatly limited compared to our last time we ran this workshop so as to give plenty of one-on-one attention to students. We’ll get to use the latest iOS 4 SDK with its... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/22/2010
What have we been doing with our "20%" time the past couple weeks? Read on to find out. It's been a busy couple of weeks in the Clojure and Ruby world for us.
The (first clojure-conj) was announced. This event is being organized by Clojure/core and Relevance, Inc. Make sure to sign up if you are interested in attending this fantastic opportunity.
Clojure/core released Clojure 1.2. If you've been waiting for the official version to be released, the time is now!
Alan has been... more »
Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 08/22/2010
Ashlar‘s infrastructure is now live. Basically, we have a compiler and a runtime (ashlarc and ashlar, respectively). Ashlar compiles code down to a component (JAR + properly configured metadata). When Ashlar executes, it loads the component (OSGi install + processing), checks the metadata for any additional components required, fetches those additional components via Ivy, and loads them. Only after all that is done does it invoke the component (OSGi start + processing), which fires... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 08/20/2010
I recently had the opportunity to chat with Stu Halloway (the author of “Programming Clojure” and the CTO and co-founder of Relevance) about, as you can probably guess, Clojure.
Briefly, Clojure is a “dialect of Lisp” and “predominantly a functional programming language” and thus, has a lot of smart people excited. As Stu himself states in the podcast, Clojure “unleashes the power of the JVM” and (in my interpretation of his words)... more »
Posted by:
Matthew McCullough
on 08/18/2010
I’ve recently been asked about my Bash prompt (derived from a conglomerate of similar OSS solutions) that shows off the current Git branch and the status in the prompt. Here is my version for both Mac and Unix.
gist: 48058 Windows (Cygwin) Show Git dirty status in your Unix bash prompt
gist: 47267 Show Git dirty status in your Unix bash prompt (symbols not compatible with CygWin)
more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 08/18/2010
Last week at Agile 2010, Joshua Kerievsky and I facilitated an Open Jam session (open space) about what done means. We discussed a variety of points. I believe we eventually agreed that context matters.
It’s important to know what your product success criteria are. If you don’t use a project charter where you define success criteria, consider doing so. (Yes, in Manage It!, I have a discussion on what success means. I have downloadable templates too.)
You also need to know... more »
Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 08/17/2010
A few years back, I started exploring programming language implementations. Generally, I wanted to understand the kind of decisions and trade-offs that programming language designers make: specifically, I was curious as to why Scala made some of the decisions that they did, and so I went down the road of trying to build a language that “fixed” what I perceived to be issues in Scala. That language was called Cornerstone.
After a while, I discovered that there are good reasons... more »
Posted by:
Matthew McCullough
on 08/17/2010
Today, I’m excited to be presenting Git (my current favorite topic) to the Atlanta JUG (AJUG) on behalf of the No Fluff Just Stuff Symposium Series. Gunnar Hillert has been most welcoming, and Pratik Patel has been a great promoter of the talk. Thank you both.
In about 75 minutes, I’ll explain why the Git Version Control System deserves your attention as your next version control system. I’ll show you its blazing speed adding 5000 files to a repo, creating a repository... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/16/2010
Relevance is growing fast. A hale and hearty welcome to our four newest full-time teammates:
Stuart Sierra: Stuart Sierra is an actor/singer/writer/coder who lives in New York City, where he is a regular at both LispNYC and the downtown theatre scene. As technical lead of the Program on Law & Technology at Columbia Law School, he developed the groundbreaking legal search engine AltLaw.org. Stuart is the co-author of the book Practical Clojure. He received his M.S. in Computer... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 08/16/2010
Sid Anand, who writes the Practical Cloud Computing blog, has a series of posts entitled “SimpleDB Essentials for High Performance Users” in which he outlines a set of best practices and conventions for effectively leveraging SimpleDB. If you are using SimpleDB or are planning to, I highly recommend reading his points as they are super hip. Check out:
SimpleDB Essentials for High Performance Users: Part 1
SimpleDB Essentials for High Performance Users: Part 2
SimpleDB... more »
Posted by:
Stuart Halloway
on 08/15/2010
Come to Relevance and help our team build awesome software solutions for our partners. We are currently hiring for several Project Manager positions as part of our growing team. We aren’t looking simply for Scrum Masters, or (definitely not) Microsoft Project experts, or even 30 years of management experience. We are looking for people who can enable a team to accomplish great things and provide a bridge between our team and our partners, making sure our communication channels are as... more »
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NFJS, the Magazine
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by Daniel Hinojosa - HTML 5 Update
by Brian Sletten