http://blog.mattwynne.net Tea-Driven Development Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:13:22 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en This evening I facilitated our first coding dojo at work. I'd spent some time over the holidays putting together a progression of Cucumber acceptance test cases to build up the solution, and had solved the problem once myself. I used the minesweeper kata from http://codingdojo.org/ which was a really nice easy ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2009/01/07/minesweeper-dojo/ At XP Day 2008 I proposed an open-space session on pair programming. Specifically, I wanted to explore the reasons why programmers might not want to pair, or find it such an unpleasant experience that they're put off doing it again. Judging by the great number of people who turned up and ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/12/16/why-pairing-sucks-in-08/ I'm just back from this year's XP Day, London. Thanks to everyone who came and packed out the room to hear Rob and I talking about our experiences evolving our team from Scrum to Kanban. The slides are here. http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/12/14/slides-from-xp-day-talk/ I recently came across this blog post from the venerable Chris Wanstrath (of github / err the blog fame) which took me somewhat aback. Chris suggests that using class << self to contain class methods (C# / Java programmers read 'static methods') is a harmful habit that should be discouraged. I ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/12/01/in-defence-of-class/ A while back, I asked the Cucumber team for the ability to call in the steps of one scenario from another. The canonical example of this is the 'log in' scenario: Scenario: User logs in Given there is a User whose username is "matt" And I follow "log in" ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/14/dry-up-your-cucumber-steps/ Pair programming brings a great many benefits to a team that's truly mastered it. Those of us who are lucky enough to have experienced working on a really effective XP team know about that almost magical thing that starts to happen when the barriers between different members of the team break ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/08/total-programming-and-the-xp-team/ A common sloppy mistake I see programmers making is to forget to declare a method as private when it's only being used inside a class. This seems to happen more in Ruby, or maybe it just bothers me more because we don't have interfaces. Rails ActiveRecord validation callbacks are a ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/07/your-private-methods-are-none-of-my-business/ I going to be speaking (with my good friend Rob Bowley) at the forthcoming XP Day conference in London, 11th & 12th December 2008. Which means that I am now officially extreme. Dude. Come to my talk if you want to hear my experiences of breaking a team out of the ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/11/05/i-am-extreme/ 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 ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/10/27/ubuntu-eee-the-os-your-eee-should-have-been-born-with/ 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 ... http://blog.mattwynne.net/2008/10/23/logging-http-error-messages-in-ruby-and-rails/