Seven steps

The Siren Song of the "Dark Factory" If someone offers to give me software for free, I’ll take it.

You're knee-deep in a sprint.

I've been helping teams and organizations improve their approach to agile and lean delivery for a decade now, and by far one of the most difficult things to wrap one's head around is the idea of iterative delivery of value.

What problem are we trying to solve?

GenStage is a miracle of UX for developers.

Choosing the right editor Intro: My editor history Here are my "credentials".

Part of being a professional programmer is learning new languages (seriously — past a certain point, you should be fluent in a couple of languages, but that's another blog post), and part of being a good programmer is being effective at doing so.

I just found a great example of the variability of the need of creating maintainable code.

The value of a rapid test suite Developers and codebases The bare minimum required of a developer is "make this change without breaking anything else in the code", and if you've been around software development for any period of time, you know that's hard…

Elixir, because: I think of Elixir as an idea whose time has come; or rather, a great gathering of ideas.

What this entry is and is not about This entry talks about estimates in a relatively perfect world.

Someone I worked with once said, "The code didn't demonstrate that I hit a wall, just that I understood a wall existed."

Spreadsheets Spreadsheets are evil.

Shu Ha Ri comes from the world of Japanese Noh theater, and has been since attached to the world of martial arts and <a title="Alistair Cockburn's words on Shu Ha Ri" href="http://alistair.cockburn.us/Shu+Ha+Ri">Agile development</a>.

So, the litany against fear goes like this: I must not fear.

“Life is going to present to you a series of transformations.

I'm back from Rubyconf.

The first class went really well.

<h1>What Sparring Is</h1> Sparring is a playful and explorative interaction.

In the dojo where I spent my formative years as a martial artist, there is a school creed.

Why are these things always so weird?

More to the point, should Rails die?

No object should have more than three public methods Objects should not have getters or setters Everything else must be private If three private methods are doing something similar, then maybe those are the public methods of another class Never inherit Al…

EASY!

I had an epiphany tonight about something that just about everyone knows: the three monkeys.

<h2>You're training wrong!

If you're using Devise and rspec on Rails 3, and you want to override a controller, and you end up with an error that makes no sense whatsoever: 1 Undefined method 'name' for nil:NilClass well then, you probably want to add the following line to your tes…

This song is at least as old as 1973 and is originally from Italy (Giorgio Gaber - Dente della conoscenza).

Ruby has a neat feature called at_exit which takes a block and then executes the contents of this block when the program ends.

The Art of Agile Planning (#aoap on Twitter, and AOAP from now on) is a 2-day course.

Here is a thought with which I've been wrestling for quite a while - the focus of society on knowledge and what it could be doing to us as people, human beings, and members of society, as well as to society itself.

You can use xargs to grep the same word through different files.

We've been using git at work for a greenfield project and, so far, this has worked for us.

I flew overnight from Vancouver to be with you today.

Une pierre deux maisons trois ruines quatre fossoyeurs un jardin des fleurs et un raton laveur une douzaine d'huitres un citron un pain un rayon de soleil une lame de fond six musiciens une porte avec son paillasson un monsieur décoré de la légion d'honne…

First, <a title="official Ruby site" href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/" target="_blank">get Ruby</a>.

The Master had been clear on this point - the room was treated so the five physical senses would be useless.

Sensei helped me figure out that my punches are all wrong, and the issue has been traced to lower back muscles.

On Monday, April 26th, I am starting a new job at Cyrus Innovation.

Hooks are a fascinating bit of Ruby magic.

On February 28th, 2010, I took the test to become a second-degree black belt.

I will readily admit that I don't know all that much about Github or Git for that matter.

Last night, after some kicking drills and sparring, sensei entrusted the adult class to me and told us to work on kusanku.

There are a few gotchas: If you have a SSD drive, you need to <em>modprobe pata_sch</em> to see it. when using GRUB, install it on whatever drive the hard drive is, even if it's /dev/sdc – and let your FSTAB use /dev/sda.

Let's break the monotony with something funny: The English are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist threats and have raised their security level from Miffed to Peeved" Soon, though, security levels may be raised yet again to Irritated or even…

I was working on a parser for a very specific tree structure, and was frustrated that there wasn’t a simple way to parse it in irb.

One can't actually move a remote branch, but you can copy a branch and delete a branch, so… Copy oldbranch in repo to newbranch. 1 git push {repo} {oldbranch}:heads/{newbranch} Ex: git push origin foobranch:barbranch renames foobranch to barbranch Remove…

Look, Ma, these are my baby steps in algorithms!

I don't really have a better name for this.

<a href="http://railsblogger.blogspot.com/2009/03/in-queue_15.html">Calling RAKE tasks within the Rails environment</a>.