Mark Edgington

After a number of comments around the conference regarding the near fanatical religious nature of the guys on the Ruby stream, i had to attend. I was not disappointed. If you broke the panel down into individuals i believe you would get a very balanced discussion around the sessions subject, When is Rails an appropriate choice however as a panel lead by Nic Williams, was in my opinion hindered. Why? well Nic is quite obviously an intelligent guy, with alot to offer, but on this occasion (maybe due to the fact that it was the end of the day), all he offered was general sweeping statements, about the greatness of Ruby; which may well be true, but a little backing up would have been nice. The problem for me was, i really wanted to know when rails, would be an appropriate choice. I came away with comments regarding the fact that it does not run the same on Windows as Unix, and you start to get worried business sponsors; especially if there development team are stocked with Windows PC’s and there not that keen to run Virtual PC for development purposes. Couple this with the only use pushed was for CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) apps and you don’t feel particular informed. Does this sound like a recipe for world domination?

I actually was happy with my view of Ruby and Rails before i went. I think its a great language and framework for the right problem, CRUD applications. I also think that Ruby’s usefulness has been expanded into the Java world by JRuby and the IDE integration in Netbeans and INteliJ. The tie ins with Java, allow it to be used clearly as an external DSL (Domain Specific Language) that can augment the general problem solving capabilities of Java with a fantastic and agile language like Ruby. It would have been nice to expand my knowledge beyond what i knew, rather than just be told ‘Rubys Great, use it’ for an hour.

Another excellent talk in which Kent provided his latest views on how he thinks problems should be solved from the design point of view. He started by following on from his keynote, pushing that we must design with people in mind; design for the skills of your availoble developers. The talk built up to five principles that Kent felt should be followed when a problem or new piece of functionality is required:

• Leap (you have confidence, just do it)
• Parallel ( you lack a little confidence do it in parallel)
• Migrate (your comfortable with your solution that is in parallel, migrate to it)
• Simplify (eliminate constrainsts to make the problem easier)
• Place a stepping stone (tackle it a piece at a time by breaking it into easier steps)

Walking through the list showed a clearly thought out path and one which i belive is useful in the approach.. The aim is to try to move your functionalty towards Leap, i look forward to more on these ideas.

I was not quite sure what to pick today, after almost going for Java Performance i opted for the Agile route. The session was not quite what i expected from the title or excerpt, but still very enjoyable. David Anderson came at agile almost from the standpoint of standard problem software projects. He looked at how these could be edged towards the agile world through clear identification of the value stream (process) and the examination of metrics around this. His key take outs that quality should be the focus and reducing the work in progress (WIP) leads to efficiency: in effect shorter cycles or sprints work far better than large batches of work. Having concentrated on agile methodologies, this viewpoint of how to get to agile inspired lots of thought; it is often the case that a covert agile approach must be followed, where a full and open method such as Scrum, cannot be taken.

My favourite comment from David ‘ the sign of a poorly managed department is one where the manager is always complaining of being busy’ this leading to a lack of change; see my previous post on the book Slack, which this comment ties into nicely.

written on my N810, so please excuse grammar and spelling