SVN vs ClearCase

At a current client we just swapped over from using ClearCase and ClearQuest to using SVN with clear check in comments within our team and updating the ClearCase repository daily.

The change in productivity is striking. One team member mentioned today that he felt he was saving around 2 hours a day. If that's accurate then on a team of 8 people it's equivalent to freeing up 2 people every day.

It's not just the time spent waiting for version control, but those pauses people make to 'quickly' grab a drink or check their email so the pair are not there when the tool does finish. Not only that, everyone is having more fun too. No one likes waiting for hour glasses. Everyone likes feeling more productive.

Are any steps in your processes disrupting the flow of your work? Can a change of tools help?

The key is to work out the features of the current process that are actually require and which are just nice to have.

Ping Pong Programming

Ping Pong Programming

Aim: To get your pair to do the hard work.

Setup: The game begins with a failing test. Players take turns...

Turns: You have 3 options

1
a/ Make the failing test pass
b/ Do any refactoring you can see
c/ Write or Uncomment a new failing test

2
a/ Comment out the failing test
b/ Write a simpler failing test

3
a/ Comment out the failing test
b/ Refactor to simplify the code
c/ Write or Uncomment a failing test

Hints: If your turn is longer than 3 minutes try option 2 or 3

Notes: Give this a go and notice how frequently you change drivers. Great when you have a pair that hog the keyboard.

Freelancing on Rails

If you are freelancing as a software developer and especially if you are focused on rails, you should check out Craig Ambrose's podcast series.

I have had the pleasure to work with Craig at both Torus Games and Open Windows, and always find him insightful, pragmatic, and a pleasure to work with.

Check it out at http://www.craigambrose.com/podcasts

Hobo on Rails

Hobo looks great! It's a web framework built on top of Rails. It's structured as a plugin, so you can use as much or as little of it as you want.

I recommend checking out the screencasts to get a good overview of how this all works. I must say, I'm impressed.

I love the way it simplifies updating of several parts of a page with a single ajax call. Their solutions seems to be to tag parts of the page, then in the ajax call pass a list of parts that will need to be refreshed. The page is therefore telling the controller what parts to spit back, so the controller doesn't need to know the 'current page'. I'll have to look into exactly how this works.

I was also very impressed by DRYML, their templating system. It's just so simple! You define custom tags which is equivalent of defining functions, so they have a list of parameters and a body. When calling the tag you can pass in the details as the parameters. There is a nice concept of a context object for evaluation of any part of the DRYML, which simplifies the code in the tags too.

[It still find it amusing when people proposing their framework as the fastest way to develop a web app use php for their own site. What's with that?]

Updating your Textmate Bundles (UTF-8) issue

Assuming you got your bundles from svn... (you did didn't you?) ... then you can update them in the following way.

cd /Library/Application\ Support/TextMate/Bundles
svn up *.tmbundle

Doing this I got an error though

subversion/libsvn_subr/utf.c:466: (apr_err=22)
svn: Can't convert string from 'UTF-8' to native encoding:
subversion/libsvn_subr/utf.c:464: (apr_err=22)
svn: Ruby.tmbundle/Preferences/Completion: ENV[?\226?\128?\166] variables.tmPreferences

This is to do with having a local set that doesn't allow UTF-8.

export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

will fix it. Add them to your ~/.bash_profile to make the change permanent.