
While I’m commemorating anniversaries this summer, I just remembered another one. Ten years ago this summer was when I first read the original Kent Beck “white book”, Extreme Programming Explained, which is one of only a couple of books that completely changed the way I approach whatever it is that I do. Considering that...
Read more »
Tags: agile
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Not much time this morning, not many accumulated links. So just a little bit today. Book Status Still writing the new parts of the legacy coding chapter, last night a little bit on removing dependencies. I think only one more section to go before that’s a complete draft. Next up, I think, is making...
Read more »
Tags: agile
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Repeating yourself is clearly an occupational hazard of blogging. I’ve been trying to put together a post about pair programming for a while. Somewhat randomly, I found myself wandering through my blog archives at Pathfinder, and I came across this little essay, which was the last thing I wrote at Pathfinder before, shall we...
Read more »
Tags: agile
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Update Beta 4 of Rails Test Prescriptions is now available, with two new chapters, one on Rcov and coverage in general, and one on writing better tests. Buy here. While I’m in the self-promoting mode, the book is also available for pre-order at Amazon and other exciting locations. More Promotion And while I’m here,...
Read more »
Tags: agile, Dropbox, iPad, Kent Beck, Mocha, Typing
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Michael Blechar, vice president in Gartner’s Applications Architecture Research division, just posted his thoughts on Agile development, a development method we at ELC prefer to achieve superior results. Blechar’s post go back to a recently publis...
Read more »
Tags: agile, Article, Industry
Posted in ELC Code, Publishers | View Comments

Top Story Thoughtbot talks about their plans for Shoulda moving forward. The big takeaway is that, while the context library will be separated out for use in Test::Unit, both Shoulda style and Shoulda effort will be focused on RSpec integration. I have some complicated thoughts about this one. I’m thrilled that Shoulda is being...
Read more »
Tags: agile, git, PDF, Relevance, rspec, shoulda
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Book Status The Cucumber chapter is nearing final edit for beta. I cleared up a handful of errata, of which probably the most serious was a mistake on how to get the fixture data to pass the first test in the book. I’m hoping to get Beta 3 out later this week, and then...
Read more »
Tags: agile, Consulting, gems, Onion, RailsRx, Rubinius
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Top Story JRuby 1.5 is out. Highlights include improved Rails 3 support, better support for Windows, better FFI support, better startup time (yay!) and a lot of other tweaks and fixes. Book Update Still Cucumbering, hope to finish today. The book is still on sale, of course. And I’d still love to see more...
Read more »
Tags: agile, apple, estimates, iPad, JRuby, Kent Beck, Newton, Potterverse, railsconf
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Top Story As part of the Chirp conference, Twitter and the Library of Congress jointly announced that the Library will be storing Twitter’s entire public archive. I’m sure your expecting an easy joke about how many sandwiches the LoC now knows about in their archive, or about how scholarly papers about the archive will...
Read more »
Tags: agile, Bundler, iPad, Library of Congress, pair programming, Pragmatic, ruby, twitter
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments

Top Story iPads. Lots of them popping up in and around work. Probably some more coherent impressions coming later. Wait, once again, Twitter has a big announcement after I start writing this. This time, they are going to start placing ads in the Twitter stream in various ways to be announced today. My quick...
Read more »
Tags: agile, apple, Bundler, iPad, JRuby, ruby, standup, Yehuda
Posted in Publishers, Rails Prescriptions | View Comments