I mostly blog over at Cucumber nowadays, with the occasional dabble with Medium and quite a bit of Twittering.

If you’re looking to get started using Cucumber to test any kind of web application, this is a great introduction.

Getting started with Cucumber and Capybara from Matt Wynne on Vimeo.

We’ve also got some other great spakers like David Anderson, Liz Keogh, Karl Scotland, Clarke Ching and Gojko Adzic, to name just a few. Book your ticket now!

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A little lightbulb went on recently as I read “Let my People Go Surfing”, by Yvon Chouinard, the founder of the outdoor clothing company Patagonia. Patagonia was founded by a group of friends who were social misfits: “dirtbag” climbers and surfers who only worked in order to save cash for their adventures. When they came to work, they wanted to enjoy it:

I wanted to have a company where people came to work on the balls of their feet, taking the stairs two at a time.

Yvon describes in the book how they’ve worked hard to keep this culture alive at Patagonia. Increasingly over, the years, I’ve prioritised enjoying my work over how much I can earn from it, and I believe that this search for joy is a fundamental part of my model of craftsmanship. When I haven’t enjoyed a job, either I’ve worked with people to change things so that I do, or I’ve left. I think it’s impossible to truly craft something when you’re working in an unpleasant environment with people you whose company you don’t enjoy. On the other hand, when I’ve had the privilege to work with great people using great tools, I feel like nothing can stop me.

So for me, craftsmanship is about finding joy in your work. Here’s Brian Marick on Joy:

Now, I could say that a joyful employee is a productive employee, and that lack of joy on a project is like a canary keeling over in a coal mine: a sign that something big is wrong and you better pay attention. Maybe thatâ€s true. Iâ€d certainly like to believe it. But, fundamentally, I donâ€t care. I think joy is its own excuse. We deserve it. More to the point, those people around us deserve it.

An idle mind is a questioning, sceptical mind. Hence it is a mind not too bound up with ephemeral things, as the minds of workers are. The idler, then, is somebody who separates himself from his occupation: there are many people scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation.

— Robert Luis Stevenson

Second, though, is that I have well and truly caught the twitter bug. If you haven’t tried it yet, I really suggest you give it a go. It’s a great way to engage in conversations, and it somehow breaks down barriers very effectively, possibly better than any electronic medium I’ve played with yet.

See you over there? http://twitter.com/mattwynne

What can you do?

• Sign the petition
• Visit the campaign website
• Come to Extreme Tuesday Club’s next meeting to find out more.

My last hurdle was to install the mysql ruby gem, which is never easy on OS X, as I learned the first time around a few days ago.

However this time, I was stumped. The gem seemed to build OK, but would simply not appear in gem list. Finally, I found this miraculous post.

So for those who aren’t up to speed, the solution (which worked for me) is to patch your mysql installation (as opposed to the gem) so that the gem will build, then do some ‘morse-codish crap’ with the gem install command… here we go:

sudo edit /usr/local/mysql/include/mysql.h

Add the line

#define ulong unsigned long

Save.

Now your local mysql install will be happy to build the gem.

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-dir=/usr/local/mysql

Note the double-double-dash shenanigans.

The bad news is that it looks as if my present client may be running out of interesting work for me to do, for the time being, which is a real shame as I’m greatly enjoying working there.

The good news though is that this means I’m now available for hire again! If you need an experienced, charismatic programmer, technical architect or coach to join or lead a team of programmers, and you’re serious about that team producing high-quality code that delivers maximum value to its users and enjoying it as they do so, then I think it’s time we had a little chat.

Read more here: http://mattwynne.net/work/cv/programmer/