Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 03/12/2010
I’ve done a fair bit of fairly small open source updates recently.
jQuery PeriodicalUpdater: The main function now returns a handle that can be used to call stop(), thereby ignoring any updates that may come back and preventing future updates from being sent.
TestingLabs: I released TestingLabs 0.4 to work with Grails 1.2.0. Had a bug with versioning under Grails: More info on JIRA.
Presentations: I’m now storing the slides for my presentations on GitHub. They’re... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 03/10/2010
As I previously mentioned in “Free lunches, mousetraps and the Actor model“, Edward A. Lee wrote an interesting article entitled “The Problem with Threads” in which he advocates leveraging the actor model in popular languages (such as in Java) as opposed to adopting an entire new paradigm (like Erlang). He states:
We should not replace established languages. We should instead build on them.
It appears that more than a few hip people agree with his line of... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 03/09/2010
Steve Berczuk has a lovely discussion of Manage Your Project Portfolio. You can see his review here.
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Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 03/08/2010
I recently had the opportunity to present four different talks at the Enterprise Software Development Conference (or ESDC) in San Mateo, California. In an effort to provide additional data points and information, I created individual resource pages for each talk. These pages (hosted at my company’s site — beacon50.com) provide links to articles, blog entries, tutorials, and a copy of each presentation. If you’re curious to see what you missed at ESDC, then have a look,... more »
Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 03/06/2010
Let’s start with some background.
I complained that Scala did not seem to be very functional to me, but I didn’t really know how best to express what was fundamentally wrong with it. I did know that if “functional languages have a fixed set of features” like Scala’s creator, Odersky, claims, then it wasn’t simply “first-class functions in there, function literals, closures”, “types, generics, [and] pattern matching”. Scala has... more »
Posted by:
Rick DeNatale
on 03/04/2010
Angel Dance
©
Ina Centaur
Recently, Yehuda Katz wrote an article in reaction to a Pythonista's criticism of Ruby and in particular to the complaint that you can't call a proc with parentheses:
my_method = Proc.new {1 + 2}
my_method()
Yehuda did a great job of defending why this is consistent with the rest of Ruby, and talked about how blocks in Ruby are really used. As part of the article, he conflated blocks and Procs. The... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 03/02/2010
A politician once mused
A free lunch is only found in mousetraps.
While this quote is amusing, it’s painfully true. In fact, the whole notion of a free lunch and its consequences was copacetically captured by Herb Sutter in an article entitled “The Free Lunch is Over: A Fundamental Turn Toward Concurrency in Software” that was published in Dr Dobb’s Journal back in 2005. In this well crafted masterpiece, Mr Sutter tore apart the misplaced belief that... more »
Posted by:
Rick DeNatale
on 03/02/2010
Yesterday I found myself trying to figure how which version of Ruby was the latest on a particular date. I had trouble finding a resource with this information using google, so I posted a query to the ruby-talk forum, and Urabi Shyouhei posted a list derived from the ftp site.
In the interest of posterity, here's the list as of now:
Ruby VersionRelease Date (in Japanese time zone)
Ruby... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 02/24/2010
Last week, when I was on vacation, my most recent Stickyminds column went up. I somehow expected more comments. Maybe other people were on vacation, too?
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Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 02/23/2010
One of the problems many people encounter when moving to agile is that they (literally) cannot imagine iterations shorter than 4 weeks.
I rarely recommend an iteration as long as 4 weeks now, and if people insist on 3 weeks, suggest they find the root cause for the reason their iteration needs to be so long. “Our builds take too long” or “our testing takes too long” are the most common problems I’ve heard. If you know what causes you to need more time, you... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 02/22/2010
Back in the Age of Aquarius, I wrote an article entitled “Use test categorization for agile builds” in which I attempted to delineate various types of tests and then went on to suggest how to categorize these various tests so as to get the most out of a build run (i.e make it fast and effective at providing meaningful feedback). Back then (and to an extent now) my concern was with test execution; that is, I like to categorize tests as fast and slow. Accordingly, I run the fast... more »
Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 02/21/2010
As part of the Lambda Lounge, established by Alex Miller (Thanks!!), we have started a group to study the SICP. We just started and are going virtual... if you would like to participate, email or tweet me (@kensipe). In the process of studying SICP and LISP, I plan on focusing on Clojure. Clojure was previously on my machine as I was reading Stu's book Programming Clojure, however increased usage would require some maturing of my tools. This led to the discovery of Mark Reid's blog... more »
Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 02/20/2010
I just released the DynamicDomainProperties plugin for Grails, which allows domain classes to have dynamic properties. It’s pretty nifty, if I do say so myself.
Based on my frustration with the Grails plugin culture because of differing cultural assumptions about open source works, and based on my lack of appreciation for the promises of indirect compensation offered to me as an open source developer, I’ve decided to release it under the GNU-Affero GPL 3.0, which is... more »
Posted by:
Andrew Glover
on 02/18/2010
While I don’t spend a lot of time on the .NET platform anymore, I’m still a big fan of Boo. Having cut my teeth on Python many years ago, I’ve always enjoyed hip Pythonic languages and when Boo came out for the .NET platform way back when, I jumped on the opportunity to experiment with it and leverage it at client sites. What’s more, it’s no secret that I’m a fan of DSLs as I do find they can be quite powerful, for example, in leveraging natural... more »
Posted by:
Ken Sipe
on 02/17/2010
I was able to attend speakerconf 2010 this year in Aruba. It was an amazing gathering of talented leaders in the software development space. Each day of the conference started with several 15 – 30 minute talks lasting roughly 3 hours. According to the retro at the end of the conference, most people enjoyed and preferred these short talks as a primer to longer conversations in the afternoon along the pool or beach. Most talks were met with the struggle to maintain time often due to the many... more »
Posted by:
Bob Payne
on 02/10/2010
I met Aslak at the Agile 2009 conference for the first time. In fact this is to date my one and only conversation with him. I have used the Cucumber framework at a number of clients to facilitate automated regression testing at the story level. His work builds on the work of several of my previous interviewees.
David Chelimsky
Dave Astels
Ward Cunningham
Bob Martin
Rick Mugridge
I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I enjoyed our conversation.
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Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 02/09/2010
I’ve been working with Gil Broza on our teleclass series, Prevent Your Agile Titanic, both on marketing it and on its content. And it never fails, we have questions for each other almost every day. Sometimes I’m developing something and it looks “funny.” So I ask for review. Sometimes, as with the content, we discuss and one writes, and then we switch.
Pairing seems natural to us. We hadn’t paired before this venture, and that doesn’t matter. We are... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 02/08/2010
Erik Gfesser posted a lovely review of Manage Your Project Portfolio. Thanks, Erik!
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Posted by:
Robert Fischer
on 02/05/2010
When encountering a bug in an open source project, most Java people seem unwilling to either fix it themselves or pay the maintainer to fix it—they’d rather abandon the project or kludge their software painfully and repetitively. WTF?
CommentsFebruary 5, 2010, Hamlet D'Arcy wrote: In the past my problem has been that my organization would not let me rely on a personal or nightly build of a project. So when you need a workaround by the end of the week, waiting 2 months for the next... more »
Posted by:
Johanna Rothman
on 02/03/2010
I wrote a little article about Barriers to Agility in the most recent version of PragPub, the online magazine from the Pragmatic Bookshelf. There’s a bunch of other good articles in there, too. Andy Lester has a great article about speaking as a way to practice interviewing, a bunch of comments/thoughts/rants about the iPad, and much more. Take a look!
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- Hibernate Performance Tuning, Part 2
by Scott Leberknight - Virtualization for Development
by Pratik Patel - Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture
by Neal Ford - Writing Secure Code with ESAPI
by Ken Sipe