On the Market
Crazy times we're living in! Well, as luck would have it, my torrid love affair of the past five months with Ruby on Rails has come to an end. So...I'll be on the market for a short time while I decide where my next home will be.
If you're interested in hiring the guy behind this blog (and this résumé), now's your chance.
I had a ball with Rails, and I'd be interested in continuing down that path with my next gig, but...there have been some interesting developments in the .NET sphere since I've been away, and I could easily go back in that direction as well.
Ruby Inspires Great Code
Ruby is filled with examples of great, intuitive APIs..., and it seems that developers who write their own code in Ruby strive for the same level of obvious, inspired by the beauty of the language. We all want to provide that same feeling of happiness to developers that they get just from using the Ruby language directly.
- Excerpt from The RSpec Book
I can say from first-hand experience that the above is true. There's something about Ruby that inspires you to write code that's more expressive, obvious, and intuitive.
IKEA v. the Amish
There are at least two separate groups of software developers: craftsman and industrial programmers. Neither of them is better than the other, but they are widely different and service very distinct markets. An analogy that I've been told is reasonable is the difference between IKEA and an Amish Craftsman in Mid-Ohio. People go to them for two different things. You don't go to the Amish Craftsman to build you something on the cheap, made of inferior materials, poorly constructed and that was intended to be replaced in a couple years. Likewise, you don't go to IKEA to buy a piece of furniture that has the potential to become a family heirloom. Different goals and a place for both. Nobody I've talked to has said they think of IKEA as a craftsman workshop, just like nobody thinks of the Amish workshop as an industrial factory pumping out cheap product.
Testing ScribeFire
So here's my first post from ScribeFire, a blogging client implemented as a Firefox extension. See you on the other side, blog post.
Pop the 'Why?' Stack
You should discuss...the feature and pop the why stack max 5 times (ask why recursively) until you end up with one of the following business values:
- Protect revenue
- Increase revenue
- Manage cost
If you’re about to implement a feature that doesn’t support one of those values, chances are you’re about to implement a non-valuable feature. Consider tossing it altogether or pushing it down in your backlog.
- Aslak Hellesøy, creator of Cucumber
(If you follow the link, you can also read the transcript of an IRC session in which Aslak helps someone pop the "why?" stack for a "login" feature.)
TDD and Double Entry Bookkeeping
I want you to think of TDD the way accountants think of dual entry bookkeeping. I want you to consider it as an essential part of your profession. I don't want you to think of it as optional. I don't want you to think of it as a luxury. I want you to think of it as absolutely necessary to your professional and personal self respect.
