Blog An exploration of the art and
craft of software development

June 2009 Archives

10 Commandments of Good Ruby Code

Posted by Marty Haught on Jun 18, 2009Comments

Last night at the Boulder Ruby meeting I led a discussion on what makes good Ruby code. I used a short deck of slides to guide the discussion based off "Alberto G’s recent post. Here are those slides (reformated in keynote’s black theme to minimize the pdf size). The slides can’t capture the discussion which lasted much longer than I had anticipated but they are still good as an overview.

Living the Good Life Now

Posted by Marty Haught on Jun 30, 2009Comments

Having just returned from a well-earned week off hiking in the mountains with my wife, I had plenty of time to do some thinking about my life and how things are going. It was quite a blessing to be completely disconnected with no computer or cell coverage. It was just me, my lovely wife, the beautiful mountains and nature for the better part of a week.

One of the things I was pondering was my work-life balance and the general priorities that I have made in my life. A couple weeks ago I attended a Silicon Flatirons interview of Brad Feld on work-life balance. I liked hearing Brad’s solution to this issue and it gave me some food for thought. One of his points is that he schedules a week off, totally disconnected from work, every quarter. How fitting that I was about to do the same thing myself. I can attest that when the week was over I was indeed refreshed and excited to get back at it. I highly recommend taking a real break from your daily life to recharge if you’re feeling even the touches of burn out.

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Pair Programming Thoughts

Posted by Marty Haught on Jun 01, 2009Comments

Last week @bryanl requested some opinions on pair programming and I’m finally getting around to posting my thoughts. I’ve been pairing on development teams since 2004 though in the last 6 months I’ve seen very little pairing due to being on a super small teams. This post will focus on the observations I’ve made about pairing during that time. Most of these points will be about healthy pair programming. Like with most practices, if you do it wrong it can do more harm than good.

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