Practices of an Agile Developer

I just finished reading Practices of an Agile Developer by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt. What a great book! I found myself nodding vigorously on virtually every page. For developers new to agility, this is an invaluable resource. And, to those of us who have been in the agile space for a while, it's good to see smart people proselytizing the same stuff I preach all the time. I particularly like the format Venkat and Andy have chosen, presenting common wisdom at the start of each section, then thoroughly debunking it in the body of the section.

Even if you are already a die-hard agilista, this book is a worth read. Highly recommended.

Improving Agile Communication using Old Tools

By popular demand, I'm blogging about a communication tool we're using on our current project. I've discussed this in my Productive Programmer talk at No Fluff, Just Stuff, and I've answered the Expert Panel question of "What is your latest favorite productivity tool" with this answer. Several people have asked me follow-on questions, so I thought I'd blog about it.

One of the difficulties in distributed agile development is keeping the communication link strong between the geographically (and time zone) separated teams. We are trying hard on our current project but still fall well short of the ideal. We do have some bright spots, though. The primary communication medium between the developers is a wiki we set up for the project. For a while, we attempted to type in really comprehensive summaries of each day's development work. However, we eventually realized that we were duplicating effort: we already put detailed comments for our check-ins to Subversion. So, we had one of our temporary resources cook up the following little developer shim.

He created a tool called SVN2WIKI. It uses the SVN post-commit hook to harvest the comment of the code just checked in. It then posts those comments to the Wiki, creating a dated page if one doesn't exist or adding to the page already there if it does. The Wiki we're using (Instiki) offers an RSS feed for all changed pages. So, we installed an RSS Reader (RssBandit) on the developer workstations. Now, when a developer sits down, he or she can get an up-to-the-minute summary of all the stuff that has happened to the code base since the last time he or she looked. Because it's an RSS reader, it keeps track of what you've already read. This is a great way to keep up to date at a really detailed level for what is happening to the code base.

This hasn't eliminated the need to create daily summary pages, but these can be much more terse, and focus on outstanding questions across the ocean. The Wiki contains a living history of the project, told one check-in at a time. For those who say that agile projects don't keep documentation, the Wiki on our project is a living, breathing history of the project at a really detailed level.

Our SVN2WIKI tool is a good example of piecing together a bunch of old and common technologies (SVN, Instiki, RSS) to create a great time saver for developers while improving the toughest part of our project.

The Ajax Experience Recap

I just finished speaking at The First (but certainly not the last) Ajax Experience, in San Francisco. It was held in the beautiful St. Francis hotel in downtown San Francisco, and it had the who's who of the Ajax world there. Ben Galbraith and Dion Almaer, the creators and maintainers of the Ajaxian web site, along with Jay Zimmerman of No Fluff, Just Stuff fame, put on a first-class conference. It was an interesting conference in that Ajax doesn't exist in a vacuum: it must be hosted on top of some other technology. I told one of my friends that it was like a condiments conference: you can't really have Ajax without some medium to present it upon. In any case, it was interesting to see such a diverse crowd rub elbows and get along so well. At one of the expert panels, we had the Lead Program Manager on the IE7 team sitting next to the creator of JavaScript. On another panel, the evangelist for the Microsoft Atlas framework sat next to the creator of Dojo (and 2 seats down from me). I represented pretty much the entire testing track there, showing a packed room how to use Selenium to test Ajax applications.

Because Ajax is at once broad (represented by the number of frameworks) but diverse (because it can be applied to just about any underlying web technology), I wondered if this conference would be a success. I can safely say that it was a resounding success, and it's going to happen again in the fall on the East coast. Kudos to Ben, Dion, and Jay for a great experience.

Buy 2, In Case You Lose the First

The No Fluff, Just Stuff anthology (edited by yours truly) is now orderable (they have gone to the printer, meaning that you can pre-order them from Pragmatic Press or get the PDF version right now). Check out the book page on the Prag's site to see it, order it, and fetishize it. I suggest that you buy at least 2, in case you lose one. And, nothing say lovin' to your spouse like an anthology of technical articles. Great wedding gifts, too.

Spreading the DSL Virus

Everywhere I go now (in a technical context anyway), I'm associated with the idea of Domain Specific Languages. At the No Fluff, Just Stuff expert panel this last weekend in Denver, my friend Scott Davis introduced me (we each introduced the member of the panel sitting on our right), and mostly what he said about me can be paraphrased as "he's the Typhoid Mary of DSL's". When I mentioned DSL's in answering a "Why is Ruby cool?" question, Ted Neward (the moderator) jokingly told me to not talk about it anymore.

But it's spreading further afield. I was at the Microsoft Technology Summit last week, and asked a DSL related question of Don Box when he was giving an Indigo talk. Afterwards, I chatted with him for a while about DSL's. Apparently, I got his attention. This week, he posted a blog entry looking for me to explain what the hell it was that I was talking about at MTS06. His blog entry and my reply is here. I pointed him to a great blog entry from my co-worker Jay Fields to illustrate to Don the power of this technique (found here).

As my regular reader(s) may know, I'm currently working on a book on DSLs for Pragmatic Press. The author team of Joe O'Brien, Jeremy Stell-Smith, Zak Tamsen, and myself are working hard to spread this virus far and wide.