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March 2009 Archives

#mwrc 2009 Recap

Posted by Marty Haught on Mar 15, 2009Comments

Mountain West Ruby Conference, #mwrc, has come to a close and I have to say that this was definitely the best one yet. The pace was quick, the socializing was great and it was packed with great talks. Luckily they were recorded so you will be able to watch them yourself soon.

Unfortunately, the ‘hallway track’ is not something you can experience if you didn’t attend. It had a strong presence this year, more so than in past years. Engine Yard hosted two hack nights that went into the wee hours. I didn’t stay much past 11pm myself but the room was packed both nights filled with hacking, conversation and food/drink. I would guess 40-50 folks were there at the night’s busiest time. We also had ample time for both lunch and dinner. Many interesting conversations were add and we didn’t feel rushed to get back to some keynote. For lunch we had two hours before having to get back.

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#mwrc Videos available

Posted by Marty Haught on Mar 23, 2009Comments

Videos from the Mountain West Ruby Conference are now online. I’ll be updating my previous post to include links now that they are available. Thanks Confreaks!

The Simplest Thing That Works

Posted by Marty Haught on Mar 30, 2009Comments

This phrase, or the original ‘The simplest thing that could possibly work’, comes from Extreme Programming and is something that I’ve worked with for the last five years. In essence it is a goal to avoid unneeded complexity and strive for simplicity. But I don’t want to focus this post on the usual technical aspect of this topic. There are many more eloquent posts on the subjects by those that championed this principle years ago.

Instead I want to mention how this thought has come up in the recent months. The main application of this principle is in business direction and building an application from scratch. It is very easy to make a long list of features your new application needs to be successful or usable. This is a trap you want to avoid. Yes, eventually it would be nice if you had all 20 of those features. However, do you need all 20 before you have a usable product?

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