Tea-Driven Development

On finishing a long contract and project at the BBC a few months ago, I was incredibly touched to be given a brand new Asus EEE PC as a leaving gift by my colleagues.

Although I loved the tiny form factor and take it with me practically everywhere, I was never quite satisfied with the default Xandros Linux and have fidgeted around ever since trying out different options, spending way too much time on the on the excellent eeeuser.com community site, zapping the flash drive with different distros.

Finally this evening I think I found the answer: http://www.ubuntu-eee.com/

Slick, easy to install, great looking, and of course a proper operating system under the hood. Props to the team who put this together, it’s terrific. If you have one of these little beauties yourself, I highly recommend checking it out.

Rails comes with some default logging stuff built in, but if you’re used to the sophistication of the log4x frameworks, it’s pretty basic.

One of my requirements is to be able to log exceptions that occur during an ActionController HTTP request, and have the configurable logging mechanism decide what to do with them - most likely send emails and write to syslog in production, in development I’ll want it to write to a file and maybe growl.

Looking around the web, there was a project to port log4j to Ruby, but it appears to be moribund. The imaginatively named Logging framework looks a lot more lively and mature. I mean, it’s on github… What more could a budding Ruby hipster possibly want?

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Last weekend I was at CITCON Europe, a great opportunity to meet some of the leading minds in the agile software movement. One intriguing new term I heard a few times was “value fetish”. Let me try to explain what I think it means, and discuss the implications for agile teams.

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