Just a reminder that this Wednesday (August 13th) is the next Agile Tampa meeting. I’m speaking this month on a talk titled “XP and Scrum: Tools and Practices for Making Your Organization Agile”. Pizza starts at 6pm, and the talk starts at 6:30pm. Michael graciously says it will go till 9pm, but I promise not…
Off to Agile 2008
It’s that time of year again! Agile 2008 starts on Monday in Toronto, and I’m looking forward to it. I do have some concerns about the quality given the number of people (1600) coming to it. They used an interesting stage concept this year, so we’ll see how that goes. I’ve also joined the Twitter…
Shining a Light on Processes
It’s late at night. You’ve gotten hungry or thirsty, and have decided to pop down to your kitchen for a snack. You just want to grab it and go. Halfway through the kitchen, you hear something skittering across the floor. You also hear a strange sticky sound, and what also sounds like water dripping. You…
Comparing Google to Cuil (and Live too)
Some friends wished out loud for a way to compare the results of Google to the new search engine Cuil. Ask, and ye shall receive. And because I’m sure someone will be asking, here’s a Live vs Cuil page as well.
Welcome Spammers…
So this evening I’m happily toting along, and I look down to suddenly having over 100 unread email messages in my inbox. Looks like someone has used my main email address as the “from” for a big spam run. Who knows how bad *this* is going to be. Anyway, if you’ve come to the site…
Speaking at Agile Tampa next month
Next month, on August 13th, I’m going to be speaking at the Agile Tampa meeting on “XP and Scrum: Tools and Practices for Making your Organization Agile”. It’s a long title (as anyone who has paired with me will know, I like long method names to describe behavior), but it will cover some very important…
Rails 2.0 apps without a database
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…
Agile Retrospectives
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…
Akido and Communication
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…
Problems in Rails between Development and Test Databases
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,…