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October 2009 Archives

Aloha on Rails slides posted

Posted by Marty Haught on Oct 12, 2009Comments

It’s taken long enough but I’ve finally uploaded my slides from my Aloha on Rails talk Lean Teams – Doing More with Less to SlideShare. Please check them out if you’re interested.

Code as a Garden

Posted by Marty Haught on Oct 23, 2009Comments

Lately I’ve heard a lot of folks talking about technical debt. There’s an angle on this discussion that I haven’t seen highlighted much. Most of the talk centers around the team either knowingly or unknowingly taking short-cuts and writing bad code. Martin Fowler does a nice job of defining these different types in his technical debt quadrants post. Uncle Bob Martin follows up with more thoughts on these types of debt. I agree largely with what both are saying. So what do I think is missing?

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Comment troubles

Posted by Marty Haught on Oct 17, 2009Comments

I’m not sure what’s wrong with my Disqus integration but it seems that all my blog posts have 0 comments. Some of them do not and it’s frustrating to see those comments not showing up on the blog. I hope to resolve this soon. In the meantime, please feel free to use the comments. Posting them does work fine (as far as I can tell). I will read them and most likely respond. Eventually I’ll get it figured out with the Disqus team and everyone else will be able to see them too.

Follow your Passion

Posted by Marty Haught on Oct 19, 2009Comments

I’ve had a couple blog posts bouncing around in my head since returning from Hawaii and I’m now finally getting some time to write them down. It’s been a week since I’ve been back but it’s crazy all the things that build up when you go on a full week’s vacation.

First of all, Hawaii was great. Aloha on Rails was a delightful conference. Awesome job Seth and on your first try no less! I gave my first conference talk and though I wish I could continue to tweak the presentation, it went off just fine. No embarassing moments beyond struggling with the projector resolution. Thanks again to Seth for choosing my talk and giving me the opportunity to share with the community.

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When is agile too much?

Posted by Marty Haught on Oct 06, 2009Comments

At the end of the first day of Aloha on Rails, Jon Larkowski ran a panel ‘Is agile too slow?’. Obie Fernandez, Tammer Saleh, Pat Maddox and Blake Mizerany comprised the panel. I was very curious to see what would come out of this panel. They went through several questions but the main point of the panel was exploring if there were any contexts in which agile processes might not be a good fit. Unfortunately, they only disagreed slightly and I could think of a few cases where I wouldn’t choose to use all the agile processes. Since no one brought up these cases, I figured a follow-up blog post with one example is required.

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