Red Squirrel Reflections

Tyler and I will be presenting the fruits of some of Obtiva's Rails work at Agile 2007. We have delivered several planning and tracking tools for software development teams using Rails over the last six months. Through these engagements, we discovered that Rails proficiency and Agile coaching are a killer combination for creating planning tools that you can adapt alongside your process. While there are plenty of one-size-fits-all agile planning tools out there, they often do too much, too little, or can't adapt to your needs. If you're an agile team using planning and tracking software (rather than Excel or index cards), you need software that's actually soft, like an agile process.

If you follow a methodology out of the box, you will have one that fits some project in the world, but probably not yours. --Alistair Cockburn, Agile Software Development

Kevin introduced me to Gareth Reeves almost a year ago, and Gareth and I quickly hit it off as we carpooled to the first annual RailsConf. I was excited to meet Gareth because I remember reading some of his papers on XP back when I couldn't get enough of the XP kool-aid. Ever since then we've been working on getting Gareth into Obtiva and I'm thrilled to announce that we finally have him!

Gareth has been involved with XP from the early days, and was mentored by none other than Kent Beck. He brings a mountain of agile and Java and (more recently) Ruby experience with him and we're excited to see where his expertise takes us. Gareth's first gig will be joining Ryan for a Rails coaching gig at a nearby hedge fund.

I'm excited to announce that my primary goal for 2007 will come to fruition next month. Since we opened our Wheaton office in December, I've been splitting time between working on-site at one of our main local clients and leading our Rails projects out of the office. Obtiva just landed a project (yet another coastal gig) that will allow me to work full-time out of our Wheaton office building our Rails practice and further establishing our Craftsmanship Studio. Life is very good.

While the project itself is interesting in its own right, one aspect that greatly excites me is that Jeff Patton, agile product design pundit, is heavily involved. I am excited to collaborate with Jeff and experience his approach to agile software development on an ambitious Rails project like this one.

I've brought my Lightweight Visual Thesaurus back to life. I'm hoping to make some improvements to it this year, like supporting more browsers than just Firefox.

I've been pleased to see next week's Rails/TDD course in downtown Chicago fill up to match the attendance of our August course in the burbs. I'm excited to spend the week with another group of programmers willing to get their hands dirty in Ruby, Rails, Ajax and Test-Driven Development. I'll post an update after the course with thoughts, observations, and lessons learned.

I'm even more excited to see the course travel to Atlanta in December with my good friend Obie as the instructor.

I got a little thrill just now when I wanted to have a look at some changes I've made in one of our Rails projects and it occurred to me that I love TextMate's diff view. I hadn't tried this before so I typed it in and crossed my fingers...

svn diff config/* | mate

Which (and I shouldn't be surprised by this) instantly popped up exactly what I wanted:

I'm not sure why anyone would want to run Watir scripts on a handheld device ... but since the iPhone runs on OS X and ships with Safari, I'm wondering how difficult it would be to get SafariWatir setup ... just because we can.

I'm not sure why anyone would want to run Watir scripts on a handheld device ... but since the iPhone runs on OS X and ships with Safari, I'm wondering how difficult it would be to get SafariWatir setup ... just because we can.

I'll be heading to sunny Columbus in February to speak at erubycon, a conference focused on Ruby in the Enterprise put on by the artisans at EdgeCase. I'm honored to share the same web page with the other erubycon speakers: Bruce, Stuart, Justin, and Neal.

HooverObitvaMacBook:~ davehoover$ irb --simple-prompt
>> 'rose'.capitalize
=> "Rose"
>> 'RoseHoover'.swapcase
=> "rOSEhOOVER"
>> 943222 + 3000000000000000000000
=> 3000000000000000943222
>>

Hamish released the first rb-appscript gem, paving the way for the new and improved SafariWatir. Now with non-sluggish performance! Seriously, my regression test script runs ridiculously fast on my MacBook Pro compared to previous versions of SafariWatir.

This performance boost comes as no surprise. Up until now I was doing the simplest most naive (and slowest) thing that could possible work by using backticks to invoke AppleScript from the command line...

`osascript <<SCRIPT
tell application "Safari"
  do JavaScript "#{script}" in document 1
end tell
SCRIPT`.chomp

This got me started, but it turns out that using an Apple Event bridge like rb-appscript is more natural, and so much faster...

app = AS.app("Safari")
document = app.documents[1]
app.do_JavaScript(script, :in => document)

In unrelated news, my fellow Obtivian Tyler Jennings has submitted his first Rails patch.

Today was the last day of the second run of the Ruby on Rails TDD Boot Camp. It was an excellent week spent with a comfortably-sized group of strong developers from diverse backgrounds ... some with many years of web development experience, some with none, some with Ruby expertise, some with none. One difference from our first course was that, at least from my perspective, this group gelled. I attribute this difference mostly to my nervousness, and subsequent hurried delivery, in our first course. The second time around I was able to pace things better which had a calming effect on me, and I predict this will continue to improve.

My most noteworthy lesson from this course should serve as a warning for anyone considering taking this course in the future:

We are teaching people Ruby and Rails and Ajax in the context of Test-Driven Development We build a Rails project from scratch via TDD The first two days are spent on introductory Ruby and Rails material The diversity of people coming to us for training means that we won't be able to work at the right level for everyone in the room, but after seeing some experienced Rails developers in my last two classes somewhat frustrated by the introductory material, I wanted to provide a warning for the future. When in doubt, read the course description.

Today was the last day of the second run of the Ruby on Rails TDD Boot Camp. It was an excellent week spent with a comfortably-sized group of strong developers from diverse backgrounds ... some with many years of web development experience, some with none, some with Ruby expertise, some with none. One difference from our first course was that, at least from my perspective, this group gelled. I attribute this difference mostly to my nervousness, and subsequent hurried delivery, in our first course. The second time around I was able to pace things better which had a calming effect on me, and I predict this will continue to improve.

My most noteworthy lesson from this course should serve as a warning for anyone considering taking this course in the future:

We are teaching people Ruby and Rails and Ajax in the context of Test-Driven Development We build a Rails project from scratch via TDD The first two days are spent on introductory Ruby and Rails material The diversity of people coming to us for training means that we won't be able to work at the right level for everyone in the room, but after seeing some experienced Rails developers in my last two classes somewhat frustrated by the introductory material, I wanted to provide a warning for the future. When in doubt, read the course description.

I'm slowly working my way through The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, a book that looks at democratic capitalism form a historical and theological perspective. Much of what I've read reminds me of the talks and writings of Nathaniel Talbott on homesteading. I read a quote last night that reminded me of a quality that makes many ThoughtWorkers special, and something I'm trying to cultivate at Obtiva. I'm talking about this contradictory quality of being fiercely independent, and yet cooperating almost continually with their colleagues. The quote that struck this chord was about a family that journeyed from upstate New York to the Iowa territory in 1842:

They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal. p. 135

I immediately thought of Obie and Aslak when I read this. When the three of us were on our first project together at ThoughtWorks, I was star-struck by their development prowess. They are certainly intelligent, ambitious, and motivated guys, but the thing that struck me was the breadth and vitality of their personal networks. Colleagues were frequently IM'ing them with questions ... and whenever we were stuck, we didn't just have Google at our disposal, we had a responsive network of world-class developers to ask questions of. And we often did. This is a habit (and network) I have taken with me as I left ThoughtWorks. While individual qualities are critical for success, a cooperative network is a distinguishing asset that is hard to detect on a resume or portfolio.

I'm slowly working my way through The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, a book that looks at democratic capitalism form a historical and theological perspective. Much of what I've read reminds me of the talks and writings of Nathaniel Talbott on homesteading. I read a quote last night that reminded me of a quality that makes many ThoughtWorkers special, and something I'm trying to cultivate at Obtiva. I'm talking about this contradictory quality of being fiercely independent, and yet cooperating almost continually with their colleagues. The quote that struck this chord was about a family that journeyed from upstate New York to the Iowa territory in 1842:

They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal. p. 135

I immediately thought of Obie and Aslak when I read this. When the three of us were on our first project together at ThoughtWorks, I was star-struck by their development prowess. They are certainly intelligent, ambitious, and motivated guys, but the thing that struck me was the breadth and vitality of their personal networks. Colleagues were frequently IM'ing them with questions ... and whenever we were stuck, we didn't just have Google at our disposal, we had a responsive network of world-class developers to ask questions of. And we often did. This is a habit (and network) I have taken with me as I left ThoughtWorks. While individual qualities are critical for success, a cooperative network is a distinguishing asset that is hard to detect on a resume or portfolio.