If your a fan of creating Rails applications using ZenTest’s autotest and want to use it on a Ruby project, then you will need to follow this convention:
Just a little something I learned trying to get autotest to work with my Ruby project.
Smashing Magazine has a nice list of 45 jQuery tips and techniques for improving your users experience. This includes things like login screens, navigable menus, text size slider, and more. It is definitely worth checking out if you are thinking of using jQuery on a project.
Sarah Taraporewalla’s post on “Improvements to the usual stand up meetings” got me thinking about what the point of stand up meetings actually is. In her post, she mentions that
I only want you to tell the team what you think is valuable to them; what did you do or find yesterday that is of value sharing with the team; what do you know, that we need to know.
Ever since I was on a project where we were told to not talk about anything technical, I have always wondered about what is of value to the team. I am a developer, valuable things to me are usually technical and of no value, or interest, to the business people. Does this mean I should say nothing at my stand up?
At my current project, our stand ups have gotten very dry and boring. They have basically devolved into status meetings about we did yesterday. We then have a dev huddle around the story wall and actually discuss things of possible value. In reality, this is also just a status meeting where we give our current status to the tech lead. He goes through the stories and we say where we are and when we will be finished.
This has always bugged me. First because I don’t really like giving my status twice and second because it seems a tad redundant. Shouldn’t I be saying in my stand up what I would say in the dev huddle? Also, because the dev huddle has no real rules assigned to it, it can get quite long and boring.
Okay, back on track and enough with the complaining. I merely offer up the above as an example of my question about what the point of a stand up is and how does one decide what is appropriate to say and has value?
Rubular is a website that I have incredibly useful over the past few weeks. It is an online Ruby app that tests Ruby regular expressions. You enter your regex online with a string that you want to match it against and the app will show you what matches. In addition, if you have any groups, it also shows the what is in the groups.
