Once again, Facebook has rolled out some new changes, and once again my news stream is filled with updates along the lines of “Facebook has ruined MY internet” (come on, it wasn’t intended as a personal insult). The changes in question are the addition of lists as a first class entity (in the interface – [...]
Foreman is a gem that allows you to define what processes an (rails) app needs to run. For example background workers, pubsub etc. Typically I like to deploy my applications to at least two environments: staging and production, not to mention running it in development locally. I had to do a bit of wrangling to [...]
Last night I went to a debate on Software Craftsmanship at SPA2010. The general consensus seemed to be that Software Craftsmanship is bad, but software craftsmanship is good. Notice the capital letters. I want to pick up a point Ade made. He said: “I don’t believe that good software comes from a process or an [...]
The reason Rails is so amazing is the way it pushed the boundaries, and made everyone accept an order of magnitude improvement. On a business level, it made it an order of maginitude easier to create a websites. Companies that could not afford websites now can. Small teams that did not have the ability to [...]
This recent post by Ola argues that if you plan to write big software, you have already lost. He is talking about why we should not write projects with many many lines of code. To me, this is a bit of a truism. Is it not always the case that doing the same thing is [...]
I love UML sequence diagrams! It’s a beautiful visual way of understanding how a series of method invocations work, what the interactions between them are, and generally a kick-ass tool for good understanding of whats going on. I have sequence diagrams! They are slow to draw, difficult to modify, and a big drag on a [...]
Gwyn and I are going to be presenting at the upcoming Scrum Gathering presentation in Munich. We are presenting a tour de force of all the practical techniques we have developed over the last 18 months or so, while New Bamboo has been aggressively moving into a fully agile model. Lots of traditional scrum (and [...]
Capistrano comes with a set of tasks ready to deploy your application. Unfortunately it doesn’t come with an easy way to view those tasks, and how they are related. Here is the graph you are probably looking for This is a pretty crappy state of play! Given that Capistrano is the recommended way to deploy [...]
