Things that go Wump in the Night..

Agile? Love it. Much talk about agile is how it helps deliver things to the client, but I want to talk about how it fits into work habits.

I think in layers

I like to sneak up on the end solution in stages, and agile works with that just fine. I’m also more of a “beginning” person who gets lost a little in the “middle” and sometimes finds it hard to say “finished”, so the definition of tight stories, each of which has it’s own start, middle and end works well.

I race to the finish

Iterations allow me to pull that race-to-the-finish energy out of somewhere. That’s a good thing. Typically I personally do about 50% of the work in the last 33% of the available time, so when the available time is 90 days, the last 30 are miserable. Breaking the project up into iterations has really made life better, and the overall project less stress free. If you are “plodder” this may mean nothing - but for us who for some reason leave everything until the last minute, the more last minutes there are in a project the better.

I like ticking boxes

Although I DON’T like writing stories, test cases and tasks, I DO like ticking a box that says “Done”. It feels good, especially in a team environment.

I don’t like the available tools

Now the not so great news. In my current project, what worked really well was sticky notes, and paper stuck on the wall - but it’s hard to deliver status reports from that to a client. We have a company account for an agile online tool, and eventually the job of maintaining paper and this system became too much. To a certain extent, the visibility of the big picture of the project, and that at-a-glance notion of how things were going was lost.

What I want from a tool is:

• Visibility
• Ease of use
• Minimalism
• Layers of functionality - so I can pick and choose how deep I want to go

.. so I’m going to build it.

I don’t post much in the way of politics on this blog, but I’m infuriated at the idiocy of “the system” here in the US.

I’m taking a break from reading the new Ron Paul book to post this, and it’s just incredible the difference between his positions and those of the current nominees.

I have to say now what I said back in 2004.. What are the democratic party thinking???

Put it this way. We have a country thoroughly dissatisfied with the Republican party, and what are the Dems putting up in response?

Either someone who a lot of people won’t vote for because she’s a woman, or someone that a lot of people won’t vote for because he’s black.

Go figure.

This is a NUMBERS game. The re-election of Bush in 2004 showed that. The majority of US voters don’t make educated voting decisions, and the media make no attempt to educate them about meaningful issues.

The person who wins a US election is the person that attracts the most sheep. The person who on face value ( because it doesn’t go deeper than that ) that the majority of the voting pool sees as somewhat like them. The person whose BS and rhetoric gels with the BS and rhetoric of the average uninformed citizen.

Sorry - that’s not a black guy, or a woman. It’s a old white guy whose sound bites carry sufficient charm to gloss over the fact that he hasn’t the slightest idea about global economics, and thinks that war is really cool.

It’s the old white guy who ticks all the boxes:

• Goes to church ( even though he’s endorsed by an Evangelical nutter )
• Is a war hero who suffered torture (even though he thinks that torturous sanctions against foreign nations is a pretty cool thing )
• Is white
• Seems like he knows what he is talking about ( which is ludicrous )
• Has an ‘I’m just like you’ air ( and he is if your wife is worth $100,000,000 and your friends are all Washington lobbyists )

Bottom line, I said it in 2004, and I’ll probably say it again, this country that I’ve chosen to live in is great - but I’m tired of dumbass people voting for dumb ass presidents who make dumbass decisions that are not reigned in by a bunch of dumbass congressmen that are more concerned about scoring points that looking after the interests the the people they are supposed to be protecting.

So, Mr and Mrs Average American. This is what you want?

Well if you find yourself unable to put gas in your car, to go buy a $6 loaf of bread because there’s no food in the house you are now renting from your bank, here’s the good news.. Voting for the black guy, or the white woman really wouldn’t have made that much difference anyway.

Although I’ve chosen to live here, and will continue to do so for the next few years, it’s a great relief that I have the choice to leave. I can take my family, get on a plane and live anywhere I want in Europe on either of my European passports.

It’s just a great concern to me the number of people who at that point will be sitting around in the US wondering what went wrong, and trying to work out who they can blame for it.

Yeah, me too. This blog is typo, but to be honest, I’m not a big fan.

Here’s the problem.. I don’t really want a “rails application” at all - what I want is to be able to add blog features to my current applications.

With the need for mongrels et all, what I really think we need is either:

1) An application that you can point multiple domains to, e.g. blog.domain1.com, blog.domain2.com etc. that can be a single install / application with a single environment that is multi-purpose.

2) A blog plugin, that works off a single controller for admin, and a single controller for view that can be thrown into any rails application.

I’ve been working on 2, and it’s turning out pretty well, but at this point it’s too application specific to throw out to the open source community. The focus is on simple simple simple and seo seo seo.

What started off as a standalone project, has now been integrated into Billabill here.

Features include:

• SEO: Independent control of stub, title, H1 and tags
• SEO: Blog title displayed as H1 or H2 depending on context
• SEO: Blog summary used as full article teaser reused as meta description
• Full page caching with a very simple cache clearing mechanism
• Routing setup so that categories become root directory for posting
• Category stored with a post - no separate table. There’s really no need

It can do more than you can see at Billabill, but I’m not using everything, e.g. the ability for any post to be tagged as a header, footer or sidebar menu item.. Again, features on the front without any extra complexity.

What it would need to be great though is:

• Simple THREADED comments with subscription.. why are blog comments linear!
• RSS - 10 minute job, but I haven’t done it yet
• A parsing engine to allow you to easily include links to other internal pages
• A parsing engine to include flickr content etc.

Anyhoo. If I get a chance I’ll try to bundle this up and turn it into a plugin because I really think that is the answer.. just like you can add a WordPress blog to any php site, you should be able to add a rails blog alongside any rails app.