For last week’s retrospective, we decided to focus on strategies to improve our performance as pair programmers. We chose the “Force Field Analysis” activity from the Agile Retrospectives book, an activity geared toward gaining insight. I was pleased to hear at the end of the retrospective, one of the newer engineers remark: “In my fifteen [...]
Author Archives: sarah
ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit
May 9, 2010 – 10:37 pm
I was excited to participate in the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit last Friday. Elesterama has a nice write-up of the keynote, which was followed by an unconference led by the fabulous Kaliha Hamlin. The unconference format puts the hallway track front and center, allowing for lots of interaction and great conversations. The hot topics of the [...]
Rails3, RSpec2 and WebMock
May 9, 2010 – 2:32 pm
Yesterday we were deep in the middle of coding using RSpec 2 and Rails 3 and needed to verify that a method made a specific http request. I happily discovered WebMock, which appears to be a next generation FakeWeb. Originally developed by Bartosz Blimke, I was happy to see that Sam Phillips had it working [...]
startup internships
April 24, 2010 – 7:27 am
Blazing Cloud is seeking companies to join the next session of its innovative internship program. The program targets companies which are developing with Ruby on Rails and related tech. Arguably, this shouldn’t even be called an internship — it is really an on ramp for talented engineers hungry to break into Rails development. The company [...]
rails: adding a preview option to new form
April 8, 2010 – 1:04 am
Suppose we wanted to modify a basic Rails application so there was the option of a preview before creating a new record. What is a good pattern for adding a second button to a form? There are two options: One controller action with a flag: nice articles by EyeDeal and Myers Development (from 2008 and [...]
Ruby Classes in March
March 2, 2010 – 12:23 pm
Ruby classes will be taught by Liah Hansen and Sarah Allen. Blazing Cloud is offering two classes, both on Sunday afternoons, for six sessions: March 7 – April 18th. (Note: class will not be held April 4th.) Also, note that Sarah is teaching a full week of classes on Ruby and Rails March 15-19 (details [...]
Insourcing
February 13, 2010 – 9:00 am
Outsourcing has become a familiar pattern in the software industry. As an alternative to high-priced American workers, companies will hire people overseas at a fraction of the hourly wage. I propose an alternate model of “insourcing” — hiring folks close to home who have the smarts and some of the skills but not the domain [...]
Mobile Training
February 12, 2010 – 3:24 pm
I just finished a 3 day mobile training session in Columbus, Ohio. I taught cross-platform mobile development with Rhodes, RhoSync and mobile web UI techniques. I was thrilled to be joined by Brian Moore, who demonstrated how to use mspec with Rhodes (rspec-like testing framework for mobile) and a new debugger that supports breakpoints, stepping, [...]
BlackBerry browser limitations
February 10, 2010 – 8:50 pm
Developing on BlackBerry Web UI is like stepping into 1996 with one-hand tied behind your back. It teases you into thinking you can use css, but without the ability to position divs, table-based layouts are the way to go. If you are surfing the open web, you get to use the 4.7 browser on newer [...]
WebOS Workshop Notes
January 24, 2010 – 1:59 pm
Yesterday’s webOS workshop, hosted at Pivotal Labs, provided an immersive learning experience for Ruby on Rails experts who were Web OS newbies. We required that everyone had installed the SDK in advance and verify their installation by building a very small sample project. I told people ahead of time that they would be turned away [...]