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 (and when I did it was as a consultant). I’m not missing it, but I recognize that some of the challenges you can find in a large company are peculiar and worth trying. Of the 7 tips there is one I never thought about: reading the annual report. Probably this is because I don’t understand the financial field very well, but I’d like to give it a try the next time.
TalkWare Episode 3 with Robert C Martin… Jonathan Crossland is putting together a cool podcast series. This time he interviewed Uncle Bob (who is pretty active these days but I never get tired of listening to). I heard an interesting theory about Scrum seen as the “killer app” of Agile. Thanks to this killer app, the Agile word spread across the IT world, from the developer up to higher management. Like with Rails, many started to learn more about Ruby after working with the web framework. So if Scrum is the Rails of Agile, what is the language? In my opinion the language is Craftsmanship or all the detailed technical practices that Scrum doesn’t address directly. This is the reason why Uncle Bob is consulting on practices in those companies where Scrum just got popularity.
InfoQ: “Classic” versus “Mockist” TDD, Distinction Real?… There was a time I was always mocking collaborators as part of the process. This introduces a big overhead because mocks aren’t free (speaking of test maintenance and readability). I now adopted a lighter approach where I mix classic and mock based TDD based on the complexity of the interaction and the need to mock out collaborators that are too demanding (read distracting) for the feature in development. It’s good to see the distinction discussed and I agree with Nat Price (co-author of JMock) that mocking is a tool for TDD not the test driven process itself.
Joy of Honesty in Business: A 5-parts Series - SmartBear… “A Smart Bear” is a well written and smart blog. This series of 5 articles is about honesty in business. The “discount gambit” problem is when you don’t see the floor of a price, when if you insist you get an order magnitude discount, something I heard recently about Dell where you know that the advertised price is just for losers and winners buy through a sale person instead. What I like about Apple? I know I don’t need to waste time trading for a different price. Second article suggests to sign an addendum to the contract of the actual employer if you’re developing a side project stating there are no business conflicts. Third article is about honesty as a marketing feature (!) when just being honest differentiate yourself from everyone else. Article number 4 is about “smallness” like using the “we” in a one man shop. Waiting for the article number 5 of the set. Jason Cohen’s blog is full of original ideas: I call it Agile business.
Rubyology - OpenRain - JS and CSS… I heard a great discussion about unobtrusive javascript and CSS in this episode of Rubiology. The discussion opens with a Prototype vs jQuery match but the discussion is more about Prototype and jQuery versus YUI and Dojo. Of course it depends on the context and specifically if the need for javascript is for widgets or dom access. Then unobtrusive JS pros and cons. Good to remove the visual cluttering of JS out of the HTML, bad when CSS and javascript load with slightly different timings and temporal dependencies are broken. There are hacks to make javascript wait the relevant CSS. The discussion goes on to CSS vs HTML tables. Amazing how much I learned from a single podcast.
TalkWare Episode 2 with Kent Beck… Enjoyable chatting with Mr Beck driven by good questions from Jonathan Crossland, the author of this fairly new podcast. When I hear Kent Beck talking I always learn something new and important. Kent’s take on DSL is that if they are used to substitute customer communication that’s not good. He moved from a prescriptive approach to XP to a more adaptable “what is working for you and why” kind of approach. I was not surprised to hear the answer to do you test all the time: Kent does what everybody should do. It’s a trade off about what you gain and the effort you need to put into the test phase. So he left out the Eclipse-side of JUnit max for a while to make the product shippable. Testing is a two sides effort: writing the tests and run them. The run side is what Kent is doing these days with JUnitMax. An early attempt done when he was with Agitar was not as successful.
3 years ago