David Bolton Strikes Again

Just a quick note to say that The Rubyist is a fantastic read for anyone interested in modern Ruby development.  The magazine format lends itself to a mode and tone that blogs couldn’t reproduce — obviously the articles can’t cover what is happening right now, so instead we’re treated to more general software topics and ideas.

I’d love to have a hard copy, but it appears that is only an option in North America right now.

Anyway, highly recommended!

Subversion ignore commands drive me up the wall.  Git’s ignore is much easier to use, and consistent.

Here is the process I followed to add svn:ignore to a newly added directory that hadn’t yet been committed to the SVN repo.  The magic here is the “-N” flag on the add command, since that stops the recursive add (which would add the git directories), and you can then set svn:ignore afterwards.

svn add active_scaffold_list_filters/ -N
svn ps svn:ignore ".git" active_scaffold_list_filters/
svn add active_scaffold_list_filters/*
svn ci


Simon Brown has some excellent commentary on the idea of “Technical Project Managers”:

In essence, teams get in a Technical Project Manager because they think people in this role can successfully undertake the project management *and* architecture roles on the project. Unfortunately, my experience suggests that this isn’t always the most successful approach.

I’ve seen this several times over the years — one can do the Project Management, or one can do Architecture, but almost without fail it seems impossible to do both at the same time on a reasonably sized project.  One role will be more emphasised than the other, at the detriment of the background role.

Both these roles are of such importance that crossing concerns is asking for trouble.  At a pinch, I would recommend using part time resources for each role, rather than one resource trying to cover both roles.

Yesterday I hosted a small team of programmers in our first Crossroads sprint — a day of working through issues the dedicated team at the Crossroads charity in Hong Kong have found in using some of their internal systems.  The idea being that as Rails experts, we could donate some of our time each month to helping our friends in Hong Kong out.

Brad, Adam, Nick and myself (with Matt and Steve online at Crossroads to answer our questions) spent most of the day getting setup and working on some small issues, that gave us a good introduction to the system and the coding approach over at Crossroads, and coordinating with the ThoughtWorks product Mingle, we were able to resolve several issues.

All in all, a good start to our relationship with the Crossroads team.  It felt fulfilling to be donating our time to such a worthy cause.