Author: Cory Foy

You may have noticed a new look and feel around the site. Yes, after just 5 years I’ve finally updated the theme for the site, changing entire hosts and blogging platforms in the process. The whole thing went so smoothly that it still feels wrong. Hosting Providers – I switched from HostMySite.com (still one of…

Recently there has been an explosion of “Open Space” events and sessions at conferences across the world. Suprisingly (or not-so-suprisingly) the results of these aren’t always this wonderful touchy-feely explosion of experience and sharing that open space events are made out to be. Why is that? First, there are actually two types of events labeled…

Our application supports both SQL and Oracle users. To do this, there are certain things that we need present at runtime – like an Oracle Provider. But, in our case, we require a certain version or higher due to the API calls we need to make. During testing for our upcoming release, we found a…

To many people, software projects are a lot like black magic. You are trying to build something that no one knows the contents of until it’s been built, in a way that responds to change, in some semblance of a reasonable timeframe and budget. Everything from the estimation process, to the status calls, to the…

Hi All, Over the past couple of weeks, there has been some hubub over a letter that went out from the Scrum Alliance to their user groups. This letter let to an announcement that the Orlando Scrum User Group was closing. This led to a posting I did on the Scrum Development list. This in…

I was recently building an app which needed to take advantage of versioning. I liked the look of acts_as_versioned, which is a nice add-on to Rails to versions models. However, the tutorial-fu is pretty sparse, and what is out there is pretty old, so I wanted to write up what it took to get it…

Thanks again to everyone that came out to my Software Craftsmanship talk at BarCampOrlando yesterday. I had a blast, and I enjoyed talking with so many of you throughout the day about moving forward with becoming craftsmen in your own organizations. Here are some resources I talked about or listed in the slides: Agile Manifesto…

“Bob, we need to talk. I’ve been reviewing the check-in histories, and Steve hasn’t bothered to check in anything in the past 6 days. When he does check-in, his quality is just utter crap. I don’t know what happened, but I’m tired of dealing with him and his slack attitude.” We’ve all had team members…

Some exciting news from the Day of Ruby event – in addition to the Tampa Day of Ruby being held on May 16th (which has 1/3rd of the slots gone already – so sign up quick!), I’m excited to announce that we’ll be holding an Orlando Day of Ruby on May 30th! Both events are…