December 20, 2008

This week’s highlights

As many others, I like to read, listen or watch things on the web. As many others, I try to keep track of the most important things. As many others, I use delicious. Since I like also to post a little comment about the link, I thought maybe it’s not a bad idea if I publish those links. So after I’ve seen the weekly digest on Trevor Turk’s blog I decided to do the same. Before the actual list of links I just want to spend a couple of words about the process. Trying to keep up with what happens on the net is hard and time consuming. I had to make strict choices on what to follow and I’m still pruning the rss reader.

Filtering

  • I look at the inbox of NetNewsWire regularly, usually in the 5 minutes I have between pomodoros. In such a short time what I do is reading the first few words of each paragraph to understand if the article is worth reading, listening, watching.
  • The most interesting ones (I have to be very strict about what is interesting) go into my queue.
  • I need few key strokes for that: QuickSilver, copy the link, a few more words and I append everything to an OmniOutliner doc I called inbox via AppleScript. This way I can read headlines very fast and in big quantity without even thinking about it.
  • I tag the post using one of the possible [READING | AUDIO | VIDEO]
  • If I find a new blog or rss feed I was not following and I think it should be worth to follow, it goes into the reader.

Dequeueing

I have very definite room for dequeueing. Of course I do, if not I could spend the entire day reading blogs. The configuration that works best for this is: at the beginning of the day (breakfast time), between tomatoes and longer breaks, lunch time (usually videos because I need hands for something else :), at the end of the day or after dinner, running (podcasts of course), driving (again podcasts). So:
  • I go to the inbox and pick one item
  • Sometimes I can read/watch everything but most of the time I start, paragraph by paragraph and I finish at the end of the day.
  • Was the thing really interesting? Bookmark! Write a small comment, maybe a Tweet, flag it and move in the DONE section (just for history).
  • Was the thing so incredibly interesting that I had the coolest idea ever? Blog it. Blogging is another item in the inbox queue and usually I can do it only on weekends.
At the end of the week have a look at delicious to see what was interesting. Blog it! Haaaa. Finally. Here we go:

Hit ‘Em High, Hit ‘Em Low… Saff Squeeze AKA disciplined inline instead of jumping into a debugger or manual reproducing the bug. This technique replaces what I usually do when I need to fix a bug. I manually run the app and using a couple of println I search what a value should be for the problem to not happen. Then I create a test to assert that excepted value. In saff squeeze it’s a test that will tell you what value should be expected, with the result that the test has been driven by inlining the code backward. This way the test is very selective and focused on the bug and you don’t need to understand it by approximation.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/f…… Kanban looks promising after the product shipped or has reached a steady development cycle where “user stories” repeat and the production chain can be tweaked for productivity. I’ve heard someone claiming it works even during evolutive/iterative development. Maybe. The most interesting thing is the fact that by definition the steps in the kanban chain are time boxed. So you have to identify at some point some invariant during development. Interesting.

Lessons Learned: The one line split-test, or how to A/B all the time… Split testing is a way to organize code during the roll out of a new functionality so that the old and the new application co-exists at the same time. The application will collect statistics about the behavior of the user with the old and the new functionality to grab information on how good the decision was. This article introduces the subject and at the bottom there is a much more detailed paper.

Monty Williams on MagLev | the Ruby on Rails Podcast… An interesting walk through the steps required to make a new Ruby implementation compliant with the Ruby specifications. In this case the history of Maglev, from the conception to RailsConf.

Why We Lost Focus on Development Practices… David Anderson thinks that the lost of focus on pure development practices advocated by the software as a craftsmanship movement is because developers aren’t the bottleneck but management is. Does this means that the developer community has reached their momentum and they don’t need any more innovation? I think the forces behind Agile are coming from developers and management should adapt to their way of thinking. The focus should always be on developers imho.

Emacs? Emacs. | Ruby on Rails for Newbies… If I ever decide to start developing with a new editor I’d give Emacs a try for sure. This is a simple tutorial to get you started from a TextMate/Mac persepctive by Goffrey Rosenback. Many interesting suggestions are also in the comment and a Peepcast is soon to come.

Dr Nic  » My RubyGems development tools and workflow… Dr Nic illustrates a step by step workflow to package a gem, distribute it and connecting the source code to continuous integration. Open the slides of the presentation from the page. Examples of newgem, git, runcoderun.

:jasonrudolph => :blog  » Blog Archive  » TextMate Oldie But Goodie Wrap-up… Definitive collection of TextMate tips, mainly keyboard shortcut. Some of them are just a must use. Jason Rudolph is maintaining the list as Tweets at http://search.twitter.com/search?q=TMOBGOTD

Pragmatic Dictator » Remodelling… Dan Creswell lists what underlining values are responsible for a maintainable code base instead of focusing on tools and frameworks. This list is perfect to explain why “shot gun surgery” kind of approach fails.

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