Out of my mind...: Category Development Process

Elegant Code

fred@fredjean.net (Frederic Jean) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 08:50:50 +0000

I spent some time going through the Elegant Code blog after Jared blogged about his latest interview. I was very impressed with the content and added it to my subscription list. I strongly recommend it to anyone who are interested in increasing the elegance and quality of the applications they write.

Enjoying The Rich Web Experience

fred@fredjean.net (Frederic Jean) — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:49:00 +0000

I am now in California. It should be sunny, but I can hardly tell since I'm engrossed into the most excellent Rich Web Experience conference put together by the No Fluff, Just Stuff team.

The focus of this conference is on building rich internet based applications, whether they are written in pure HTML + CSS + JavaScript, Flex, AIR or Silverlight. There are discussions around security, performance, design sprinkled around talks about frameworks.

Access to the speakers is amazing just like any NFJS events. I had conversations with Greg Wilkins (Jetty), Dean H. Saxe (Security) and the usual suspect: Scott Davis, David Geary and Neal Ford. I even indulged in a little bit of hero worship by meeting Douglas Crockford, Yahoo's JavaScript architect. He gave talks on JavaScript and JSON in addition to giving a keynote speech.

The conference itself is a fast paced mix of keynotes, expert panels, presentations and networking. The caliber of the presenters and attendees is quite impressive. This is definitively my type of crowd. Where else would you be discussing and arguing about the meaning of HTTP response codes, the merits of Prototype versus Yahoo! UI Toolkit or Paranoids at Yahoo!? Right here at the Rich Web Experience in San Jose.

Training Wheels

fred@fredjean.net (Frederic Jean) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 23:59:45 +0000

It seems an eternity ago. I hadn't begun kindergarden yet. We were living in a fairly large (or it seemed at the time) development complex in Laval, near Montreal. I still had training wheels on my bicycle. Many of my friends were rid of their training wheels. I wanted be just like them, riding a bicycle without the training wheels. I did convince a friend to let me try to ride his bike, and after a few false starts I was riding his bike. After a few days, my mom did notice that I was doing ok, and soon the training wheels came off.

Now, what does this childhood story has to do with agile development? I think of agile methodologies such as Scrum and XP as training wheels for teams and developers. The goal is to teach good habits and provide guidance and support as the team and its developers mature and gain experience. As they move forward, the methods, practices and dictums associated with the Agile methodologies become ingrained and the team is (hopefully) able to adapt them to their situation. They begin to ride the big kid bike.

Sometimes though, businesses, teams and even developers want to go straight to the end result of Agile development. They want the benefits associated with being an agile team without the discipline and structure that comes from following one of the many flavors of Agile development. They don't want the training wheels, they want to go straight to the big kid bike. Sometime they succeed, but often they don't.

Thankfully, OpenLogic is committed to being an agile company. We are implementing Scrum and are adopting more agile practices and methods as time goes by. We did have our own falls and scraped knees. We were able to look back, identify where we fell short and remedy the situation. Today, we have our product owner and other stake-holders attending our stand up meetings, we do put time into writing both acceptance and automated unit tests for our stories. We also pay close attention to our velocity, which we then use to adjust our tasks estimates.

In many ways, we still have our training wheels. But we are getting better at it. With a little time and practice we may one day be ready to get rid of them though.

[posted with ecto]

37signals Getting Real Book

fred@fredjean.net (Frederic Jean) — Fri, 03 Mar 2006 18:22:14 +0000

David announced that the Getting Real book was now available as a PDF file.

I bought a copy, downloaded it and read it from end to end. It is mostly a compilation of the 37signals blog with supporting quotes and evidence. It is a good read overall, although it did make me envious of how developers at 37signals and other startups are able to work without the overhead that I have to face here at Sun. I'm not really the target audience though since the book is better targetted to small teams and startups working on products.

I certainly recommend it.

Update: The 37signals team released a refreshed version of the PDF in response to comments from people who bought the book. It is certainly a great example of a company walking the talk.