I’ve had a long love-hate relationship with Rails. I love the MVC framework and how it’s improved our speed of writing web apps. But I’ve never really been completely happy with it. I don’t generally agree with most of its opinions. I prefer models that follow the Data Mapper pattern, not the Active Record pattern. This includes separating the persistence layer from the models’ business logic. I prefer Slim or HAML to ERB. I prefer RSpec to Test::Unit or MiniTest. When Merb hit the scene, I was ready to make the jump, until Merb merged with Rails. ...

January kept me pretty busy, so I’m a little late to this. But better late than never. And as an Agile practitioner, I don’t think personal retrospectives should be limited to one time of year. Review of 2014 Last year I wrote a blog entry listing my goals for 2014. As far as New Year’s resolutions go, I was relatively successful — about 50% of my goals accomplished. Unfortunately, my Open Source contributions weren’t as strong as I had hoped; while I released some of my own work, I didn’t do much else. I did increase my blogging; getting in on a weekly blogging pact helped immensely. I also increased my participation on the This Agile Life podcast to a level that I’m happy with. But the accomplishment I’m most proud of was giving a presentation at RubyConf. ...

I went to RailsConf this year, and the very first talk was a keynote by David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH), the creator of Ruby on Rails. The TL;DR of his talk was “TDD rarely has value”. He followed up with a blog post the next day, titled “TDD is dead. Long live testing.”, and 2 more posts. I think this line of thought is terribly misguided, and causing more harm than good. This article is my response. ...

I’ve run across a pattern in Ruby lately that I really like. It solves some problems that I’ve struggled with for several years. Let me start with the problems. Let’s say you want to include an ORM in a model class, and want to tell it what database table to use. Typically, you’d do this: class User include MyORM::Model table 'people' end But that table call is more like an option to the module inclusion than anything else. So what we’d really like is something like this: ...

I’ve decided to design and implement my own programming language, and call it Brilliant. I’ve been interested in programming languages and linguistics almost as long as I’ve been using computers. I’ve long thought that if I ever go back to college, it’s likely that I’ll concentrate on programming languages as a specialty. My recent discovery and involvement with the Crystal programming language has gotten me excited about new language ideas. It’s also helped me realize that implementing a language myself is feasible, and that there’s no better time to start than now. ...

I don’t believe that estimation should be part of any Agile practice. One of our managers recently mentioned that we hadn’t met the “contract” that we had “committed” to in our last iteration. This was complete nonsense, because A) we hadn’t made any such commitments, and B) we completed many more story points than the previous iterations (and without inflating story points). But her language made me come to several realizations. First and foremost, estimates are contracts. Sure, they’re not supposed to be treated as commitments, but they almost always are. And what does the Agile Manifesto say about this? It says that we should value customer collaboration over contract negotiation, and responding to change over following a plan. So it’s pretty clear that treating estimates as commitments is completely counter to the Agile values. ...

There’s a tweet that I saw recently, with some simple advice for novice programmers: Slow down. This is probably good advice for most programmers. Our team recently noticed that every time we try to rush things, we make mistakes. And the mistakes end up costing us more time than if we had just done things at our normal pace. Slowing down ensures that you do things right, and when you do things right, you end up with a higher-quality product. ...

Most of us don’t write very readable shell scripts. There are plenty of things we could do better, but today I want to talk about one in particular — burying the lede. The term “burying the lede” comes from the field of journalism. Here’s the Wiktionary definition: To begin a story with details of secondary importance to the reader while postponing more essential points or facts. Like a good news article, code should tell a story. And the story should start with what’s most important. In the case of code, the most important information is the high-level functionality — a succinct summary of what the program does. In other words, write (and organize) the code top-down, as opposed to bottom-up. ...

I recently decided to start using Emacs again. I used it extensively from the early 1990s until the early 2000s. I pretty much stopped using it when I had a sysadmin job with no Emacs on the servers, and no ability to install it. With the rising popularity of tmux and tmate for remote pairing, and my dislike for vim’s modes, I decided to try going back to Emacs in the terminal. ...

I’m considering buying a chording keyer. A keyer is a 1-handed text input device. Chording means that you can hit more than 1 key at a time. I’ve been interested in these for a long time actually. They’ve been popular in the wearable computing (“cyborg”) field, but never caught on anywhere else. I’ve always thought that 1-handed chording keyer would be a great input device to use with a cell phone. It’d be even better with a heads-up display like the Google Glass. ...