Merb in Action

This week, the newest 'Merb in Action' PDF 'arrived' in the mail.

The new version includes chapter 3.

I've been thinking about a Merb play project. I think I'll spike a blog.

There are a few things I'ld like to see in a blog, but seldom do.

One is a nice 'printable' view. You never see one with two printable views, with and without comments. Also with a nice list of footnoted links, you can't double click a print.

What other things should I have in a features list?


Gnoll110

Agile podcasts: Better late than never.

This month, I got around to checking Rob Payne’s Agile Toolkit site for new podcasts.

Last month Rob put up six new podcasts. One from this year and the reminder from last year’s Agile2007 conference.


1/ Agile IT Experience 2008 Panel Discussion.
Direct download: AgileITx_Panel.mp3

2/ Agile2007 - Esther Derby and Diana Larsen
Direct download: Agile2007_Ester_Diana.mp3

3/ Agile2007 - Nancy Van Schooenderwoert
Direct download: Agile2007_Nancy_V.mp3

4/ Agile2007 - Deb Hartman
Direct download: Agile2007_Deb_Hartman.mp3

5/ Agile2007 - Ole Jepson
Direct download: Agile2007_Ole_Jepson.mp3

6/ Agile2007 - Rick Mugridge
Direct download: Agile2007_Rick_Mugridge.mp3

They all proved to be great listening. Thanks for the time & effort Rob.


Gnoll110

Agile: new podcast from Agile 2007

Been a busy month.

I note there is a new podcast on Rob Payne’s Agile Toolkit Podcast site.


Rob talks to Johanna Rothman, an author, consultant and agilist at the Agile 2007 conference.

There is no abstract, so it will be a lucky dip. ;) Rob a great interviewer and pick interesting victims, so it's bound to be informative.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile agile+toolkit podcast rob+payne johanna+rothman

Ruby: First hack

Thursday night, last week, I released some static web pages. That’s nothing special, but the code that built them is, for me.

It’s me first ruby hack. It’s a flikr like doodad.

What it do?

It takes a cd of images (mainly bodybuilding), straight from the developers (I still use an analogue camera, just, but that’s another story). It crops, brands them and then builds a cluster of static web pages around them.

Using Image Magick, via rmagick, I manipulate the images. The images get rotate (if needed), cropped and branded. The data to do this is stored in a mysql data base. Each derived image is also tagged with data, so they can be captioned and grouped later. It is stored in three tables.

Next there is web page formatting. I used staticmatic for this. It based on HAML and SASS.

The formatting data is laid out as a node/leaf arrangement, also in the mysql database. Currently there is only one type of node. That is the root node type of page. All the leaf nodes types currently sit directly connected to the page node. The valid leaf types are navigation, photo grid and album. Currently there is no recursion up a node structure. That’s a future possibility.

That’s two tables, one for node and its one type, page. Not YAGNI (Your Aren’t Going to Need It), but then there is Agile Modelling. There are for leaf tables, Leaf and its three types. Six tables all up.

I’m sure you can guess what navigation and photo grid do.

Album is the complex stuff and the reason I wasted an automated process.

The album is a page cluster. On the page that has the album leaf, you get the results of the specific sports event. The event has divisions. Divisions have competitors, who appear in placing order. If a division or competitor has any photos with their tag, then it becomes a link to a generated page that contains a photo grid with all their tagged photos. The four tables that contain this data are event, division, competitor and place.

Now there is currently only one type of album. If I want an additional album structure for a different event thingy, I’ll refactor. The cluster generating methods would be moved into a command pattern that could be changed by Dependence Injection (DI). But YAGNI says that’s in some tomorrow.

What would I do differently, use rspec from the start.

Well that my first use of ruby in anger.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
first+hack ruby staticmatic haml sass

Agile Toolkit: Joshua Kerievsky Agile 2007 podcast

Bob Panye has posted the first of his Agile 2007 podcasts.

It's downloading as I type. Thanks for the effort, Bob.

Agile07 - Josh Kerievsky - Scaling training, e-Learning and certification

Josh presented a session, Introduction to Refactoring & Evolutionary Design. No note or overhead so far.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile agile+toolkit training e+learning bob+payne josh+kerievsky

Life in a 24x7 world: Seesaw

Need to be able to roll your servers processes without bringing a site down. Seewas enables you to increment the version of components in your application, without an outage.

Max Muermann and Matt Allen have written the Seesaw rudy package that lets you roll Mongrel processes.

Matt & Max were working on it at the Hax day, in Sydney, last weekend.

Has a chat to them about the next stage. The hard stage, rolling the database structure forward without downtime. I think it is possible, but the features needed to make it possible need to be part of the bone and muscle of the database management system (DBMS). I'm going to write a post able how I think it could be done and its limits.


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Technorati tags:
agile ruby rails seesaw mongrel matt+allen max+muermann

To watch: Agile Toolkit Postcast

Agile 2007 was on last week, 13 to 17 August. Have a look at the site, some of the overheads and handouts can be downloaded.

With Agile 2007 being in Bob Payne’s home town. I’m sure he will have lots of great new podcasts for his Agile Toolkit podcast site soon.

Can’t wait!

I so hope Bob got to talk with Mary Poppendieck and/or Kenji Hiranabe about their Kaizen from Toyota [with MindMaps] session!

Refactoring Databases : Evolutionary Database Design by Scott Ambler & Pramod Sadalage looked interesting.

Lots of other cool sessions too


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
agile lean+software agile+2007 agile+toolkit agile+podcast bob+payne

Project Management as servant, not Master

Jason Yip posted this agility is not the point post to his blog.

• Deliver the highest possible quality and service to the customer
• Develop employee potential based upon mutual respect and cooperation
• Reduce cost through the elimination of waste in any given process
• Build a flexible production site that can respond to changes in the market

I've started to work through Agile Web Development with Rails. In Chapter One, there is this section titled Rails Is Agile (1.1).

Let’s look at the values expressed in the Agile Manifesto as a set of four preferences. Agile development favours the following.

• Individual and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Last week we had a talk at work about Project Management (PM), went for about an hour.

At the end I expressed my opinion that Project Management trended to make an organization too lean. Lean in another sense of the work, as in over worked!.

This weakens the organization in three ways.

• Insufficient resources to respond to the unexpected, particularly human resources.
• Lack of maintenance of corporate assets, like the code base.
• Lack of deep infrastructure planning. When I say deep, I mean the shared resources used by most operational activities, including human resources.

Noone actively disagreed with me, including the three Project Managers present.

Been thinking about it more. Thinking triggered by this Seth Godin post & Jason’s post above.

The trouble with PM is when the organization develops a minimum cost/big bang approach to doing things. Be as low cost as possible, gets bodies in to do a job, gets rid of bodies at the end. The public sector is really prown to this!

One issue is that the milestone become the end all. How do you avoid this, it’s natural, the money has got to be tied to something.

PM ends up big on following Process, big on Doco, big on the Plan and big on Contract Negotiation (due to scope creep), putting it at odds with the agile preferences! These are all forms of waste in Lean terms!

Now I’m all in favour of project management (all lower case).

To steal Rowan Bunning’s tag line

"In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable." - Dwight D. Eisenhower

pm makes you think, it’s acting on the useless plans that is a waste.

Where to now?

Well the opposite of minimum cost/big bang management would be maximum effectiveness/steady state management.

What would that look like?

Maximum effectiveness means you’re not measuring costs. You are measuring outcome to expenditure ratios. Further more time and none monetary factors don’t go straight out the front door, as they do when what is being measured, is measured in dollars

Steady state implies that you keep a large core of personnel who maintain existing activities, do projects as needed and are there for the unexpected. You supplement them with specialists and contractor as they’re needed.

Another way of looking at this, is to treat employee as profit centres. That mean the organization tries to develop its employee full potential.


Gnoll110

Technorati tags:
project+management lean agile agile+manifesto

When to kill a product

After ordering ‘Agile Web Development with Rails’ by Dave Thomas et al, 6 week ago (expect delivery 4 weeks). I final picked it up on Friday. Started reading it on Saturday.

ISBN-10 0-9776166-3-0
ISBN-13 978-0-9776166-3-3
(as I always suspected, the last digit of an ISBN is a check digit :)

One bit in the Preface struck me as being worth a blog post. The last two paragraphs.

... Instead, I found myself rewriting the content. Some chapters from the original have been removed, and new chapters have been added. Many of the rest have been completely rewritten. So, it became clear that we were looking at a second edition-basically a new book.

It seems strange to be releasing a second edition at a time when the first edition is still among the best-selling programming books in the world. But Rails has changed, and we need to change this book with it.

Enjoy!

Dave Thomas
October 2006

For me, this is good example of when to kill a product way before the end of its economic life. All to often you see companies wait for a product to stop being profitable before they release the replacement product.

Know of one case, where a supplement company had a successful protein bar, with three flavours. They let the product get that old before replacing it, that they felt they could only justify redeveloping one of the flavours. Sadly, my favourate was one of the flavours lost. Use to buy boxes (12) of the stuff!

Today, I don’t buy any of this company’s products. Just too trailing edge!

After reading the Preface & first chapter, it looks like an interest and worth while read.


Gnoll110