Drew McManus of Road 3 shares his advice on managing agile projects. Drew describes when and how much to plan, the right way to share the plan, and how to keep the product and the engineering team properly focused while not losing the grand vision.
It’s hard for me to be excited about participating when I feel like I can’t contribute ideas. Sometimes it is a very formal situation created by organizational structure, for instance I don’t see those enlisted in the army having much of a voice in how their platoon operates, let alone a base or the army as a whole.
It’s hard for me to be excited about participating when I feel like I can’t contribute ideas. Sometimes it is a very formal situation created by organizational structure, for instance I don’t see those enlisted in the army having much of a voice in how their platoon operates, let alone a base or the army as a whole.
I suspect any “knowledge worker” has the same struggle that I have. Even if one has crazy hair-brained ideas, they should be heard. If they are dismissed, reasons should be given for “why” so that the idea maker can form better ideas in the future. Topics should not be off limits for discussion- if someone is tired of re-hashing a conversation, perhaps he could reflect on why the same conversation keeps happening – and address the cause, rather than the symptom.
Today I was asked about times and pairs where I wasn’t stopping my pair to catch up, to get re-engaged. What I initially took for a skill gap, might actually be my reaction to an environment where I don’t feel like my voice is heard as much as I’d like it to. While it would be nice to feel safe and warm at all times in one’s life, I have to concede that I fail to stand up and make myself heard. It is uncomfortable for me to discuss an idea that someone has already shown to be disagreeable toward.
To me, an idea is a really special concept. Someone packages up his understanding of a problem, applies all of his history, and attempts to create a solution. At worst, he hopes his idea gets feedback, more information, more understanding, so he can better fabricate ideas. In a group, his idea may spark an idea in another group member who comes up with a great solution. But when ideas go unheard, it says to the thinking employee is a near-silent whisper, “Your experience, your life, is not worthwhile.”
That whisper is my Achilles Heel. I am looking for resources that will help me combat those situations. Methods that make me a more valuable team member – because I stay engaged – because I feel that the team is getting the full benefit of having me, and my experiences at its disposal.
“How do you permanently remove a git tag?”
Let’s say you are building a leetspeak that deals with w00ts. You might write a class that looks like this:
class Woot
def ==(other)
true
end
endIn theory, any Woot is equal to anything else:
puts Woot.new == Woot.new # true
You might think that with this setup, you could do something like this:
x = [ Woot.new ] y = [ Woot.new ] z = x - y
You might expect z to be an empty array in the case, but oh how wrong you would be. In the example above, the == is never called at all.
After reading through the docs on Array, overriding all 4 equals method in ruby (eql?, equal?, ==, ===) and overriding object_id you will still not be able to make it work.
A quick look through the C code shows that Array#- hashifies the array. The hashing algorithm looks for a method called “hash” on the object. If that’s not there, it uses the memory id. Great, so now we can just add hash and be done, like this:
class Woot
def ==(other)
true
end
def hash
1
end
endWrong! You still don’t get an empty array. It turns out that the hash algorithm calls eql?, not ==, so you have to make sure to alias that as well, like so:
class Woot
def ==(other)
true
end
alias :eql? :==
def hash
1
end
endSo if you want normal array semantics for your objects, be sure to provide #hash, #== and #eql?.
JQuery Events/live + ScrewUnit = :-(. ScrewUnit swaps the DOM “out from under” the elements that Events/live is watching, which messes with ScrewUnit. Call die on the DOM elements that live events are watching.
ScrewUnit + CI + IE = :’-( Also, When ScrewUnit suites become large, they trigger IE’s “slow script” warning, which can freeze your continuous integration build. Check out the Registry Hack to set your own timeout.
We have a fan of Thor in the house: “Map options to a class. Simply create a class with the appropriate annotations, and have options automatically map to functions and parameters.” Which, as is (not) obvious, indicates that Thor is a replacement for rake.
Theo Schlossnagle: “I don’t care what you use: puppet, chef, bcfg2, cfengine – choose one and automate your configuration.” (Theo’s presentation was a highlight, check out the slides here.)
Allspaw and Hammond from Flickr: “If there’s only one thing you do, automate your infrastructure.”
There were lots of Puppet users at the conference, and Luke Kaines gave a good talk on it.
Interested in a Chef intro? Watch the video of Adam and Ezra’s talk:
From the Chef BoF:
My favorite talk at Velocity was by Paul Hammond and John Allspaw from Flickr, who are doing real lowercase-a agile:
UPDATE
Here’s the video, highly recommended:
“If there’s one thing you do, it should be automated infrastructure”. This was a refrain through the conference – as Theo Schlossnagle put it, it doesn’t matter if it’s chef, puppet, bcfg2, cfengine – whatever works for you, just do it.
Some of their techniques:
Culture, philosophy:
More:
You can never return: … except when you can. From a block, that is. Returning from a block rarely works:
result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
return x
end
=> LocalJumpError: unexpected return
But, you can pass next and break arguments, which will allow you to assign return values from the block:
result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
break(x)
end
=> "one"
result = ['one', 'two'].each do |x|
next(x)
end
=> ["one", "two"]
You can return from a lambda, though.
Check out Google Page Speed, which is like Yahoo’s YSlow, only “better.”
Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
Like chef? Love capistrano? Check out chef-deploy, which “… Uses the same directory layout as capistrano and steals the git remote cached deploy strategy from cap and adapts it to work without cap and under chef.”
SFTUG FTW! Another successful SF Tracker User Group Meetup on 06/24. Watch for future events on the Meetup site.
The project I’m working on has a lot of named scopes which are really great. If you’re not using them already you should really try them out. Since we test drive everything we do, we needed a really easy way to write tests for all these named scopes. We came up with a little test helper method that I thought I’d share so that other people could use it.
Here’s the code:
def test_named_scope(all_objects, subset, condition)
subset.should_not be_empty
subset.each do |obj|
condition.call(obj).should be_true
end
other_objects = all_objects - subset
other_objects.should_not be_empty
other_objects.each do |obj|
condition.call(obj).should be_false
end
end
To use it, just pass a superset of objects, the subset you want to test and then a lambda as a condition. The lambda should be true for all items in the subset and false for all the items outside of it.
It sounds complicated but it’s really easy! Here’s an example
Let’s look at a simple tag class that has a status column indicating whether the tag is on a whitelist or a blacklist. It could look like this.
class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base
WHITELISTED = 1
BLACKLISTED = 0
end
We want to be able to easily grab all the whitelisted tags, so we need to add a named scope.
Here’s the spec we write first:
describe Tag do
describe "whitelisted named_scope" do
it "returns the whitelisted tags" do
test_named_scope(Tag.all, Tag.whitelisted, lambda{|tag|
tag.status == Tag::WHITELISTED })
end
end
end
end
We run the spec, watch it fail and then go add the named scope to our Tag class.
class Tag < ActiveRecord::Base
WHITELISTED = 1
BLACKLISTED = 0
named_scope :whitelisted, :conditions => {:status => WHITELISTED}
end
Then we just rerun the spec and watch it pass. Easy!
Update2: Josh Susser emailed me a really nice refactoring with the enumerable partition method and Kelly fixed a bug I introduced.
def test_named_scope(all_objects, subset, condition)
scoped_objects, other_objects = all_objects.partition(&condition)
scoped_objects.should_not be_empty
other_objects.should_not be_empty
scoped_objects.should == subset
other_objects.should == all_objects - subset
end
“Does anyone have Nginx URL rewriting fu?”
The pretty documentation is actually quite hard to work with. Does anyone else have a good reference?
Some developers who were granted early access to Palm’s new operating system said it was worth the wait. “We find it’s the easiest one to develop for,” said Christian Sepulveda, vice president for business development at Pivotal Labs. “It allows for a richer experience, like having a pop-up menu and background processing, which is helpful.”
Mr. Sepulveda’s company developed four of the first programs available for download through Palm’s app store, including an item for Twitter called Tweed.