Archive for the 'Agile' Category


Oracle Mix

Posted November 15, 2007 * Comments(0)

Seems ThoughtWorks is up to it again, this time with Oracle: they’ve made a social networking application for Oracle’s customers, using jRuby and Rails.

I’m overjoyed that these enterprise applications are emerging, with big company support.  I have been “agitating” the idea of Ruby and Rails in the enterprise for the last eighteen months but have always met resistance in the Australian market.  The larger companies here are very risk averse and haven’t been able to grasp the value of a rapid development environment with strong test driven development underpinnings, but as these forward thinking organisations such as ThoughtWorks and Oracle demonstrate, there are great opportunities to be had.

Can you believe they took only 5 weeks to build this app!  I can, but then again I use Rails every day.

Ryan McMinn from UnSpace

Posted June 25, 2007 * Comments(2)

Ryan McMinn speaks at a free software symposium. Video at: http://unspace.ca/innovation/speak

Great ideas:

  • user involvement, iterate, agile
  • don’t work on something fulltime — users need time to absorb. maybe work 3 days a week and they can use for two days and provide feedback
  • “musicians make the best developers” (@ approx 13:30) — software should be a passion