mike.mainguy

Fact: putting a skirt on a Gorilla doesn't make it any more graceful Are your agile initiatives Gorillarinas? If you're working in a large organization and trying to "be agile", it often turns into a strange situation where only a superficial set of changes are made, but folks wonder why their initiative isn't able to deliver the expected benefits. This is remarkably similar to putting a skirt on a Gorilla and then wondering why it isn't suddenly graceful. I'm not saying you cannot train a Gorilla to dance ballet, I'm an optimist at heart and believe anything is possible. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the effort of taking an IT organization that has built up the overhead gunk and crud of a huge process and turning into a highly responsive and lean software delivery organization is anything less difficult than turning a Gorilla into a ballerina. This effort will be large, there will be casualties, and you will likely need ...

How many folks out there are promiscuous programmers? You know who you are, every project you work on, you meet a new technology or language and feel compelled to "try it out"... without giving the right amount of consideration to the language that is currently being used. Worse yet, you seem compelled to badmouth a language that has been really good to you ( I love you java;) ) and always compare the imperfections of your programming wife ( java, you're syntax is really bloated) to the sexy cool stuff from one of your programming girlfriends (ruby, I love your monkey patch). I'm not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, I think it is very important to have breadth in technology and learning new programming languages is a way to become a better programmer. It's more important though, to have an objective perspective about the REAL comparison and not just get infatuated with every new thing that wanders by because you think (or worse yet someone else th...

I was recently sitting through a technical discussion and was thinking about how different people were reacting to the information in the presentation. From this I started to think about how a two pairs of related factors seem to influence how people react to new technology. Here's a quick chart showing them as well as examples of prototypical statements a person at each extremes in each quadrant might speak about Source Code Control: For a bit of definition: The Conservative - Liberal continuum is a measure how inclined you are to try new technologies. An extreme conservative feels no need to use anything new and will never use anything new unless the old thing completely fails to work any more. An extreme liberal would be compelled to change technological approaches before even finishing a prototype because a new shine technology showed up on their radar. The Skeptic - Believer continuum is a measure of how much critical thinking you put into a new technologies capabil...

I recently had to debug a problem that was causing a javascript function to return the incorrect value. The code in question was right padding numbers less than 10 with a 0: so 1 became "01", 2 becomes "02" and 10 should be "10". Number.prototype.to_s = function() { if (this < 10) { return '0' + this.toString(); } else { return this.toString(); } } This works fine... in one direction. I kept running into a problem when I tried to parse this back into an integer. So I'd do something like parseInt(8.to_s()) and the result would be 0. What I didn't realize is that the "0" prefix when parsing an string indicates the number is base-8 (octal) and therefore "08" isn't a valid number. I would have, however expected some sort of error message or NaN instead of 0. The problem is that javascript will only return NaN if the first character in the string is not a number... so It happily ...

I've used each of these tools on at least one project now (JIRA for quite a few) and thought I would share my observations about when each one would be most appropriate. Pivotal Tracker Pivotal Tracker is only offered as a cloud based or hosted solution, but has a pretty impressive list of customers. On the upside, they've fully embraced the cloud concept and offer a well documented set of RESTful APIs to integrate with third party systems. You can connect issues to SCM commits using post commit hooks from svn or git (or anything with a little effort) I find the pivotal tracker User Interface be a bit confusing, but pretty useable out of the box and geared toward agile methods. Another big plus is that they can auto-estimate your actual velocity and burndown which helps you get your arms around your real velocity. In addition, they have some out of the box reporting. playnice.ly playnice.ly is also a hosted solution, but of the three has taken an more in...

In the current nosql fervor, there is an important distinction that seems to get missed repeatedly. There are two (OK three) really important factors that these tools use to distinguish themselves and many people completely miss the point. The first factor is durability -- does the data actually get saved to a disk somewhere and, if so, how often and how much might I lose if something "goes wrong"? Redis and mongodb users might be somewhat surprised to learn that, by default, they can lose your data should the process crash or shut down. While you can configure them to work around this issue, you're going to slow things down substantially doing so and therefore lose the big advantage they've been designed to provide. In short, redis is a great alternative to something like memcached, but is not really an alternative to something like couchdb. Which brings me to the second factor, which is searchability (I couldn't think of a better term) -- Key-value sto...