March 2011
1 post
RSpec, minitest, cukes & friends
I followed the discussion on Twitter after David Heinemeier Hansson declared his dislike for rspec and similar testing frameworks. This is nothing new but this time he was pissed off by some code snippet he was working on. I’ve read several interesting answers and the general consensus seems to be that there is not an absolute “right” way to spec-out features. Agree.
I always...
January 2011
2 posts
5 tags
Quick Getting Started with Clojure
Here is a quick list of opinionated links on how to get started with Clojure I prepared for a friend recently. I think it adds some value on top of a standard Google search, especially for beginners, by excluding a few (but very good indeed) advanced resources you can discover later.
The crash video introduction. If you have a Java background, have a look at the standard Rich Hickey intro part 1...
8 tags
How to find ideas for a talk
Here is a quick list of actions to consider the next time you run out of ideas while thinking at the next conference to speak at. I consistently run through the list and usually come out with a fair list of topics. Next step is of course to select the best ones and create the abstract. Each bullet in the list can take a little while to execute properly. Half a day is necessary if you didn’t...
October 2010
3 posts
4 tags
Ivy Lee and the evolution of modern time...
Just recently I learned about Ivy Lee (not the actress) who is considered one of the first public relations specialist in history. Ivy Lee is considered also the “inventor” of a simple yet powerful focus management technique branded “top 5” in our modern times by Cameron Herold.
The technique can be summarized as follow:
At the end of the current working day write down...
5 tags
SC2010 Report
I attended the Software Craftmanship 2010 conference in Bletchley Park and had a great time. A craftsmanship based conference is a collective exercise in clean programming using a lot of different techniques: katas, koans and maybe less esoteric exercises in refactoring and test driven development. This was exactly what I expected and the reason for me to attend. I coded the whole time and...
7 tags
This week's highlights
Show #80 Josh Clark, Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps - The Startup Success Podcast…
Josh Clark is not telling us the usual commonplace stuff we use to hear when speaking about what makes a mobile application...
May 2010
2 posts
Better Software Conference 2010 Part 1
I just attended the 2010 edition of Better Software conference in Florence. Overall it was a good conference with probably the best italian speakers around. The only problem for “Better Software” was that there was not enough software. Sure, many interesting talks and a lot of great informal chat during breaks. But there was very little code on the giant screens and way too many...
3 tags
This week's highlights
REWORK: The new business book from 37signals.…
The book by 37signals is not saying a lot of new stuff. But it’s not a surprise. I’m an avid reader of their blog and followers of podcasts and presentations by DHH, Jason Fried and friends and they talk constantly about what was condensed in this book. Nevertheless this is a good reading. First of all is not easy to express what...
April 2010
2 posts
1 tag
This week's highlights
Here is the summary of my lurking around the past weeks. Probably the Calacanis VS Dhh episode of Twist is my favorite on this set. But also Eric Ries’s interview about Lean Startup Thinking was very interesting. As usual, the link is followed by opinionated summaries. Enjoy.
[FoRK] Programming languages, operating systems, despair and anger…
Ah ah, enjoyed this one. There is...
2 tags
Billable Pomodoros
So you are ready to start the next project and you are a freelancer and a good Pomodoro Technique practitioner. Of course all those tracked pomodoros are a good source of information for billing. But how the pomodoro should be converted into time and then into money on the bill? My rule of thumb is the following:
1P ~= 35’
The math behind the equation assumes that breaks related to the...
March 2010
2 posts
4 tags
Lean startup thinking and acceptance tests
Listening to this great podcast where Eric Ries speaks about product market fit and validated learning I thought that lean startup thinking can drastically reduce the importance of automated acceptance tests to the bare minimum. Nothing that I had the pleasure to test in person unfortunately, but something to think about for the next project with the right business context.
What’s the deal...
6 tags
Resumed this week highlights
I never stopped my weekly reading, listening and watching but I stopped talking about it here. No notes means I forget about everything, what a waste. So I resumed the habit: just a few lines when the topic is interesting and thoughts provoking. Very opinionated! Enjoy.
Sketchnotes iPhone Tapstack App by SixVoices…
An interesting case of a company (SixVoices) selling a product which is an...
November 2009
1 post
3 tags
MacRuby CoreData Tutorial
There is an useful tutorial on the Mac Developers Center about how to use CoreData programmatically. The tutorial has been ported to RubyCocoa here and partially on MacRuby as part of the template installed in XCode when you install MacRuby. With the help of both the sources I ported the tutorial to MacRuby introducing just a few ruby-isms but without altering the general structure of the...
September 2009
3 posts
5 tags
Deep Objective-C in 24 mins →
Stop! Pull off the car if you’re driving and run home to listen to this episode of the Mobile Orchard podcast (click title) with Mike Ash. I heard the best explanation so far of the difference between methods, messages and selectors in Objective-C plus another great deal of the language quirks. All of that in 24 mins!
Runtime
First the runtime: in a typical C-based language there is no...
6 tags
ReactTable as an iPhone App? →
The ReactTable (click the title) is a visual touch-enabled synthesizer in the shape of a table and several plastic blocks. The user experience involves all senses: it includes visually displace the blocks on the table, manipulating attributes of the modules with your hands and hear the results as output. I was wondering how such an interface could be ported to the iPhone and its multi-touch...
6 tags
PragDave on DSLs →
In this article PragDave draws a line about when it’s time to stop enhancing and wasting time trying to make a DSL read like english (or another spoken language). Spoken languages are imperfect and redundant and this is their strength. The impedence mismatch is clear: programming languages need predictability and writability instead. Fluent interfaces (as from the definition of Martin...
August 2009
3 posts
7 tags
Agile 2009 Report
Finally I managed to attend the biggest of the agile conferences around. Unfortunately I missed the first 2 days which means 50% of the conference. For the 2 full days I was there I had the pleasure to attend interesting talks, knowing smart people and get a sense of how agile is doing these days. The organization was almost perfect, excluding the confusing aspect of “stages” as...
7 tags
Not Reinventing The Wheel?
http://www.flickr.com/photos/vrogy/
It depends.
Have you ever been asked to not “reinvent the wheel” by a customer or maybe your boss to implement some functionality for an existing project? It’s a pretty common situation I think. Extension by reuse is a nice thing to have and all well crafted projects with low technical debt are ready to be improved without the need of...
3 tags
Embedding MacRuby
The actual implementation of MacRuby contains a facility method used by HotCocoa macrake tasks and by the embed MacRuby target in XCode. The method only change the executable to point to the embedded MacRuby in the .app file. But all bundles in MacRuby contain a reference to the system MacRuby installed in /Library/Framework, not the embedded version. This prevents the distribution of a MacRuby...
July 2009
3 posts
4 tags
Life Lesson From CouchDB
Another Friday! Time to dump the selection of links that yours truly collected on the interweb in the past weeks. I had to wait a bit to accumulate enough material worth publishing. As usual the description is a mix of quotes and personal opinions about people, things and facts. I also try to elect a “most interesting of the week” and this time I had an hard work. I was struck by the...
3 tags
The Short Term Cycle of Productivity
I’m sure I’m not saying anything new that psychology doesn’t explain already. Anyway you may find some answers here.
The Short Term Cycle
When exposed continuously to the same subject (idea, abstraction, project, whatever), even for a few hours a day, the brain creates a short term memory of the content of that subject. The frequency determines the freshness...
4 tags
Back From The Diet
It’s about 2 months I started my information diet. I followed the plan without big troubles until now. Now it’s time to understand what worked and what didn’t. Once again the key is balance and contextualization.
The Good
Cutting the long tail: the diet had the interesting side effect of cutting the long tail of information. The long segment of the tail includes very specific...
June 2009
5 posts
4 tags
Programming Languages
This time I want to dedicate the opening of the last 2 weeks’ highlights to programming languages in general. Why? Because I had a chance to attend the Chicago Chapter of the ACM presentation with Ola Bini on Ioke. Programming languages are a business domain exactly like banking or insurance with the difference that the “business analysts” is a programmer by definition. For some...
3 tags
Everyman Report
For the past two weeks I tried one of the polyphasic schedules called Everyman. I enjoyed the experiment, especially the first 10 days but I had gave up at the end. Here’s how things went.
I first did a preparation period where I tried to consistently stay up late at night but without constraining the core sleep to 3 hours, i.e. without waking up at 5am.
I then moved to the following...
4 tags
Pomodori 0.3
I’m happy to announce Pomodori release 0.3. Just follow the link and the installation instructions on the page. For those who don’t know, Pomodori is the pomodoro management application I’m using every day since February. “819 pomodoros and counting!” is what I see right now. Pomodori isn’t just a timer, it’s a tool implementing the Pomodoro Technique. At...
4 tags
Intentional and DSLs
In what now seems to be a biweekly installment, I’ve read and listen around quite a bit lately. Since the beginning of my information diet, I have way less processing to do and my sources are only a couple of conference videos online and a few other things. The item that generated the biggest train of thoughts was the release of the Intentional software workbench that I heard of while...
4 tags
Pomodoro-GTD Interview
I had the pleasure to attend the recording of the last episode of the Virtual GTD Study Group. The topic was “Perspective and Control”, a matrix chart that describes different states of focus but I’ve got a chance to introduce the technique and give also some advices for beginners. I talked about how the Pomodoro Technique helps staying in the “Captain &...
May 2009
6 posts
3 tags
Pomodoro VS GTD
Here’s my reading notes for the last two weeks. I definitely had a lot of thinking on how to integrate GTD with the Pomodoro technique and that’s my main topic this time.
Productive Talk Compilation: 8-episode podcast with GTD’s David Allen | 43 Folders…
I’ve listened to this series back in time and I was curious to re-listen this conversation between Merlin Mann...
6 tags
Going Information Diet
I’ve got the idea not a long time ago. Main reasons behind the decision are:
I have a long queue of books I bought waiting to be read and I can’t find the time to read them.
I want to test the theory about consuming well digested and consistent information (such as books or essays) over partial and half-baked ideas (Twitter and also the majority of blog entries, plus mailing lists)
...
6 tags
Ruby VS Smalltalk
A little better on my reading queue for this week’s highlights. I think the most interesting post (of course from my absolutely opinionated view) was the Uncle Bob’s keynote talk at this RailsConf 2009. I always enjoy to hear interesting pieces of computing history and Uncle Bob is clearly a skilled storyteller. It must be fun (and also sad when you realize how old you are :) to write...
5 tags
Story Mapping
Again not so much time this week to look around into the web-sphere. My reading queue is growing, the video one is worse. Not to mention podcasts, since I couldn’t run this week for a severe back pain. I decided to report on the few things I was able to collect a summary about.
The most interesting of the week
I realized I was using this organizational pattern for user stories already....
3 tags
SmallTalk in SmallPlaces
I had less time to read/listen/watch in the last two weeks. So I skipped the summary of the most interesting reading for the last week. Ok, let’s talk about SmallTalk then. I’m very disappointed I never found the time to learn about what can be considered the father of all the modern languages you hear about. Unfortunately I need to keep this desire low priority in my task list for...
3 tags
How to take a 5 minutes nap
Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Read this… Joking :) Your attention please.
The Pomodoro Technique advocates a 25 minutes of quality, focused work followed by a 5 minutes break. There are so many ways to spend the break time, but the main goal is to recharge the brain...
April 2009
5 posts
6 tags
Webrat with RSpec, no Cucumber
For the impatient: install webrat as from installation instructions and then add this section to your spec_helper.rb that lets you create webrat specs in spec/integration folder:
module Spec::Rails::Example
class IntegrationExampleGroup < ActionController::IntegrationTest
def initialize(defined_description, options={}, &implementation)
defined_description.instance_eval do
...
6 tags
Rails gems unpack native
Suppose you need to work on an already existing Rails project. The ideal situation would be that right after the check-out you should be able to ./script/server and pointing at http://locahost:3000 the app is up and running. Most of the time it’s easy as this adding just the rake db:migrate step for development on sqlite. The next common complication is to setup mysql or another external...
3 tags
Corporate Craftsmanship
Interview with David Anderson Part I…
First time I hear the voice of Dave Anderson after reading his blog. David speaks also about craftsmanship in this episode saying that craftsmanship is mainly an individual attitude and as such it shouldn’t be a problem to apply it to enterprises because it does not require changes to the actual process. I agree. I also think that should be easy...
2 tags
Visualization Time
I was talking a while ago about esthetic in code and specifically if the way the code organizes on the screen can represent a measure of its quality. This idea is intriguing to me. Here’s something that goes close to that idea although it’s more connected to the notion of module, class or function. The work of Michele is remarkable, especially the animation of the evolving code-base...
4 tags
Naked Planning
Most important learning this week is Arlo Belshee - Naked Planning from the Agile Toolkit series. It’s a fact: this guy officially does crazy stuff! And there are only two ways to follow his work: conferences or podcasts. Considering the podcasts are recorded during the conference that means you can hear from him once every two years or so. I remember his past revolutions like...
March 2009
6 posts
4 tags
Quality is Dead?
A provocation, I know. But there is actually truth in that. It’s true that software is seen by the large public as an unstable artifact, prone to unexpected behavior, difficult to fix and unreliable. This is the point of the most interesting post I found the last week
Quality is Dead: The Hypothesis by James Bacha. We lowered the bar of software quality to such an extent that software...
MacRuby CSS Based Charts
I spiked around a while ago searching for the best solution to create charts under MacRuby for Pomodori. There are wonderful Ruby library for charting and 2D drawing in general, but the problem is to see if they are MacRuby compatible. In theory, everything can work under MacRuby as it runs under MRI but the macgem mechanism is still immature and even installing by hand doesn’t guarantee...
5 tags
Pomodoro Talk in Review
Submission for Agile 2009 are now closed but the review process is still on going. I submitted the following talk and received some good reviews and comments already. Please consider reviewing your self or send me comments about what you’d like to see at the talk.
You say tomato, I say Pomodoro
The “pomodoro technique” is a simple tracking and feedback process where the unit of work is the...
3 tags
A Start-up Life
I decided to change the title of the week’s highlights to reflect the most interesting topic I discovered running through my feeds. The same title every time is just boring and gives the impression there is no content inside.
The 1st prize this week goes to Jake Scruggs’s “On Going Fast Because You’re A Start-up” blog post. Jake talks about a typical start-up...
1 tag
This week's highlights
Here we go again. I just finished watching all the act_as_conference 2009 talks and the most interesting are already in my notes below and older posts. I’m now going through RubyConf videos and that will take more time. But still, having fun learning so much from the comfort of my chair. Happy weekend.
Agile Corner. Interview with James Shore | CocoaCast…
This podcast is a...
1 tag
This week's highlights
Greetings! Another week I didn’t have a lot of time to read, listen or watch. Nevertheless I’ve got some good link for you. The reading queue is now so long I’m thinking to hard reset and start from a clean inbox zero. Happy weekend.
Presenter First Ruby Example | atomicobject.com…
Once again the Presenter pattern. The example and accompanying documentation are well done...
February 2009
8 posts
6 tags
Clean Code Cheat Sheet
Apparently there is no definitive Grand Unified Theory but all of the following processes and principles contribute to create good software. Please print on the wall.
[PROCESS] The Get It Done Adagio Text borrowed from related Agile in a Flash card.
Make It Work. Program with your mind focused on the feature’s basic behavior. Just make the feature work. Ensure that all the test(s) pass...
1 tag
This week's highlights
Just a few interesting links this week since I was “busy” becoming a father :) Pay particular attention to Jim Weirich presentation at AAC because it’s full of interesting things about software design. Good learning.
Jim Weirich The Grand Unified Theory aac 2009…
Maybe Jim is just revisiting old books that nobody cares about, but the result is entertaining and the...
This week's highlights
Greetings! This week I’ve been busier than usual with not so much time for reading or listening. I managed to get something done though. Here’s what I found interesting in the internet this week:
7 Tips to a Successful Landing at a Large Company - Alex Barnett blog…
Interesting and original tips here. It’s a long time I don’t land in a large corporate environment...
This week's highlights
Several podcasts this week and good articles. Enjoy!
Podcast #41 - Blog - Stack Overflow…
Ha! Too politically correct (you need to listen stackoverflow 38 to understand this). Or maybe this is how things should be. I had the impression that Jeff and Joel agreed that the wrong thing was to be so harsh and offensive about quality code and TDD but they stay on their respective positions.
...
1 tag
Pomodori for Craftsmen
I received good questions and feedback about Pomodoros Monday night at the Software Craftsmanship Group. Before I dig the details you might want to check the slides and the video (coming soon) on Vimeo. The slides aren’t meant for plain reading, better if you wait to see the talk to understand the content. On my way home I thought about all the good discussions we had and here are my...