Gotham Ruby Conference was yesterday at Pace University. It was a great day - kudos to the organizers. If you missed it, check out the video from Confreaks when it is posted.
UPDATE: A few more conference pics, courtesy of Sebastian, including some of the afterparty/hackfest, where Jeanhee & Chiara came out to meet the ruby geeks!
After listening to Ryan Davis' inspiring talk, "Hurting Code for Fun & Profit" at GoRuCo today, I wrote this rake task to figure out what code to hurt. It looks though your git log, and takes the 15 .rb files in your Rails' app/ directory and runs them through flog, so you can see which are the most complicated.
Install it with sake from here.
UPDATE: If you're interested in watching Ryan's stellar talk, it will be up on Confreaks soon, or you can try the RubyConf edition of the talk.
lmelia$ history 1000 | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
184 git
122 script/story
64 rake
26 sudo
12 dig
11 cap
9 script/rstakeout
9 sc
8 ./script/story
5 history
We released Tracks 1.5 today. Tracks is the open source Rails app for implementing the Getting Things Done system. I contributed heavily to this app in the too-long time since the last stable release. Big kudos and thanks go to Reinier Balt in the Netherlands, who contributed some great statistical visualizations and generally ran the project the past few months while bsag and I have been busy with out professional commitments.
Anyway, lots of great changes since 1.043. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Remembering all those capistrano tasks can be tough for the sleep-impaired startup employee.... Help yourself out with this autocomplete script:
I'm not too into these blog memes, but I like Mike Moore, who "passed the pain" to me in his own What I Do post.
My Day Job
I recently left my job of almost 8 years at Oxygen, the cable television network for women. I'll quote and hack apart my goodbye email to give you a sense of it:
I fell in love with Oxygen when I saw all those baby fists get thrown up in the air on TV in 2000.
See the last paragraph of this for context. At the launch party two weeks after I started, I danced on stage with Luscious Jackson.
I had just started here as a web developer and didn’t know much about television, media… or software development, looking back.
I started with some Perl CGI, HTML & Javascript skills and better instincts than I realized I had. At Oxygen, I learned VB, Java and C#, SQL, and lots more geekery. I learned Ruby on my own and then introduced my team to it. I learned Agile by encouragement (thanks, Ken), reading, and trial and error, including a solid year pair programming with the same guy. (Thanks, Kris.)
I’ve grown a ton over my time here, both professionally and personally. I was a grown child when I started, and I’m leaving today a man.
What does it mean to have become a man while working at a women’s media company? I’m sure I’ll hash it out in therapy in a few years. Just kidding – it means most importantly that I’ll be a better father and husband to my daughter and wife (who I met here…).
The emotional growth that happens between 23 and 31 is pretty substantial, and Oxygen seemed to have grown up on about the same schedule.
Thanks to everyone who I had the pleasure to work with over the last 8 years, and in particular, my team and department, & Gerry: you are collectively responsible for the best moments of my professional life so far. Much love & respect.
I started off as a Web Developer, and got promoted to Senior Web Developer, which changed into Senior Software Developer after the world changed it's mind about the Web in 2001. Then Software Development Manager, and then Director of Software Development. It was all very rewarding, but best was the last year and half, when I hired a top notch team of developers and collaborated closely with our visionary CEO, putting everything we had learned about Agile into practice.
Mike tagged me because he wanted to know what I was going to do next, and all I've talked about is what I did the last 8 years. Sorry, Mike.
I'm involved with a startup that is not publicly discussing what we're doing quite yet. We're past the phase of totally secretive, so if you know me and ask me, I'll probably give you an overview.
I can say that I'm working my butt off, being challenged in lots of new ways and loving it.
My "Contribution"
I'm following Mike's format, because I'm a lazy blogger. So now I have a section about contribution to fill out.
The truth is, I'm kind of a selfish guy. I mean, we give a nice chunk of change to non-profits who we feel are doing important work. But everything else I do, I do either because I love it and enjoy it, or I can't figure out how to avoid it.
Some of those activities could pass as "Contribution," if you discount the impure motivations.
I helped organize GoRuCo last year, New York City's first Ruby conference. This year, I'm less involved, but still trying to help out. I attended the first session with my 2 year old daughter, and basically, we were more of a hindrance than a help.
I'm an active contributor to an open source project called Tracks, which helps people get stuff done GTD-style. Since I started working on it, a whole host of commercial products have been released.
My Night Job
Maybe following Mike's format is not such a good idea. I used to pick up freelance work here and there. A couple of projects for my friends the Sanborns helped me learn Rails. Anyway, I've cut out all of my "night job" because my day job is now my night job, too.
Other Stuff
I'm involved in the ALT.NET community, though I'm feeling like a stranger in a strange land now that I am working in Ruby and on my Mac 100%.
I prioritize my health and fitness pretty highly. A big piece of that is eating a mostly vegetarian diet full of all the stuff that is not fad-of-the-week but obviously a good idea, like organic fruits and veggies, whole grains and avoiding refined sugar. The other side is exercise: I use my inline skates as transportation most places in Manhattan, including my daily commute. I'm an avid beach volleyball player, and play a few times a week at my gym, which has an indoor sand court. By the way... playing sand doubles in your boardshorts when there is snow outside -- that is luxury.
My Family
I come from a big wonderful family. My siblings and I have managed to find the positive aspects of my parents' divorce -- great relationships with each of them as well as their 2nd spouses. My wife and I have loved becoming parents ourselves -- Chiara is a constant source of wonder and joy.
Who Next?
Pain begets pain it seems... I'm tagging:
I just released pdf-storycards 0.0.1, my first gem! Thanks to Ryan Davis for hoe, which made it a much easier process, and to Jacob Harris & Geoffrey Grosenbach for teaching me how to use hoe in their PDF and blog post respectively.
pdf-storycards version 0.0.1 has been released!
* <http://rubyforge.org/projects/pdf-storycards/>
## DESCRIPTION:
Provides a script and library to parses stories saved in the RSpec
plain text story format and saves a PDF file with printable 3"x5"
index cards suitable for using in agile planning and prioritization.## FEATURES/PROBLEMS:
* Create a PDF with each page as a 3x5 sheet, or as 4 cards per 8.5 x 11 sheet
* Currently reads stories from a single file.
* TODO: Take a directory and find all stories in it
* TODO: Take stories via STDIN
* TODO: Improve test coverage## SYNOPSIS:
/usr/local/bin/stories2cards /path/to/stories.txtor
StorycardPdfWriter.make_pdf("/tmp/stories.txt", "/tmp/storycards.pdf", :style => :card_1up)
## REQUIREMENTS:
Changes:
## 0.0.1 / 2007-12-27
* Initial release
Gotham Ruby Conference (aka GoRuCo) 2008 will be held on April 26th, 2008 at Pace University in Manhattan. It was a great crowd and a great day last year, and I'm looking forward to this next one. Hope to see you there!
Part of agile is acknowledging that building software is hard and human beings (including yourself) are fallible. Chris Donnan has a blog post about his recent run-in with this truth:
So - last monday (it is now Saturday), at around 8PM - I found a troubling bug in the software I was about to go to QA with. I worked on it till midnight. I worked on it with an excellent collegue the next day from around 830 AM till around 130 AM (the next day…late)…. same thing the next day, and the next… and the next… We thought we had fixed it!! We stayed till around 10pm packaging a build for QA … we were wrong, before we sent it to QA, we found the bug elsewhere…. bad. sad. un-good. did i mention bad? Today - saturday, I found the bug. It was in an area of code I had written some hundreds of unit tests for.
The rest of the post is an interesting retrospective and public re-examination of his beliefs about software development. Since Chris' comments system seem to be broken, I'm sharing my thoughts here.
At one point in his writeup, Chris notes that this was the "YEARS MOST IMPORTANT deliverable for many, many people". This is a big neon warning sign. Part of the strategy of iterative delivery in Scrum is to avoid this situation. In a well-functioning scrum organization, releases are a non-event. In fact, Jeff Sutherland was recently telling Ken and I about his weekly releases at PatientKeeper, where there is little fanfare, just an automated deployment, and if the phone doesn't ring from the customer, the release was a success.
There are plenty of reasons why iterative delivery might not have been viable in Chris' particular situation, of course. Still, when a situation causes you to re-evaluate your approach to building software, it's a good idea to look again at the decisions where you strayed from the ideal and ask yourself what you can do differently moving forward.
Great post from James Shore, whose upcoming book I'm eagerly awaiting.
In the pre-Agile world, methods got so focused on documents and processes that they stopped talking about how to design, develop, and code. They turned to naval-gazing and lost sight of this essential fact: in software development, software is king.
Agile development started out as a reaction to this problem. Nowadays, I fear that the agile community is falling prey to the same mistake.
He captures my feelings about XP very well.