Category: General

If you are interested in spinning up a Rails app without a database, it is a little trickier in 2.0 than in previous versions. Do the following: rails nodbspikescript/generate controller hello This sets up a basic Rails app with a controller. Modify app/controllers/hello_controller.rb to include the following: def index  render :text => “Hello, world!”end You now…

On Monday, I started my new role as a Development Manager of a team here in Tampa. I’m extremely excited to be working with them – they are a great team that has been around for a long time, and are excited about finding new ways to produce software. Last Thursday they released a new…

Over on the XP list, someone posted a link to an article entitled A Soft Answer. It’s a great story about an incident on a subway train between someone trained in Akido, an unruly drunk man, and a older Japanese man who shows truly effective communication skills: Now it was my turn. Standing there in…

One of the things I’ve been getting setup this week on my new laptop is my Ruby environment. I went through the Apple Leopard Rails Tutorial and ran into one big hiccup at the end – my tests wouldn’t pass. I had created an app and ran the following: script/generate scaffold event name:string budget:decimal However,…

On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of attending the inaugural Agile Tampa meeting at the Microsoft office in Tampa. They had the guys from a local Agile company – AgileThought there giving an introduction to Agile. While it had a lot of Scrum in it, they did a decent job of introducing the crowd –…

On Thursday I picked up a shiny new MacBook Pro. Having been a Windows/Linux guy for, well, ever (not counting all that DOS stuff), it’s been an interesting experience. One negative that I ran into was very slow wireless connectivity. Being that we have two other computers, an iPod Touch and my XV6700 all connecting…

This evening at the Tampa Scrum get-together, we discovered there are a *lot* of people in the Tampa Bay area who are learning and interested in Scrum. While next week is the first Agile Tampa meeting, I wanted to gauge interest in a Tampa Bay Scrum Group. So I’ve created a mailing list over on…

This afternoon I was working on some code that I don’t have the developer around for. Part of the app is a windows service which fires up a server to listen for incoming connections. I could see from the log file that we were getting an AddressNotAvailable exception, but I didn’t understand why. I had…

Mike Vizdos from Implementing Scrum is going to be in Tampa teaching a ScrumMaster training course this week. The course is full, but the group is planning a Happy Hour for Thursday evening at Bar Louie at International Plaza starting at 6pm. Nothing formal, just networking with local Scrum people over drinks. For more information,…

This week I’ve come across two great articles you don’t want to miss. The first is from the great Mitch Lacey on why your stand-ups should ask 4 questions instead of 3. It’s a very insightful article into what happens when communication breaks down. Speaking of break downs, I found an older article discussing highly…