act:ualise | technology

A fun post by our friend Ivanka who recently joined Canonical to head up the User Experience side, a role which will no doubt prove challenging but has huge potential. Those who’ve already used Ubuntu, myself included, have something of a love/hate relationship with it; likely this is because we hardcore techies are no longer their [...]

Spring has sprung and with that hails the first Vancouver Groovy and Grails meet of the year.
Time:
Monday 30th March, 18:00
Place:
WorkSpace @ 21 Water Street in Gastown, #400
Topics under the spotlight this time round are twofold:

EasyB: BDD For Groovy & Grails (Jerome Pimmel)

EasyB leverages the Groovy language with a simple readable DSL for writing BDD [...]

If you like statistics and Grails you will be pleased to know that Grails is trending higher in searches than Spring Framework since mid-2008.
Check out this Google Trends graph. (thanks @schmichri)

Eric Ries, formerly the co-founder CTO of  IMVU, is running a special Agile Vancouver workshop on the Lean Startup which he promises will involve more than just the usual slideshow and Q & A.
Whats makes Eric and the IMVU story so interesting (certainly to me) is that they are unique in having developed their business and [...]

Alistair Cockburn (@TheOtherAlistai) has posted a humorous yet incisive article reminding us that what absolutely certainly matters in software development is:

Coding
Testing
Listening
Designing

..  ergo, “That’s all there is to software. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.”
His compulsion to remind us of this core essence comes from the emergence of all kinds of newfangled buzzwords.. [...]

I happened upon the Clean Code Cheat Sheet and thought it worthwhile to share. It draws together a number of principles which help you achieve cleaner and more habitable code.
It includes:

The Get It Done Adagio

Make it Work
Make it Right
Make it Fast

The Three Rules of TDD
SOLID Principles

SRP
OCP
LSP
ISP
DIP

Law of Demeter

Bad smell
Local methods
Local fields
Local params
Local objects

Connascences
Coupling
Cohesion
Common Metrics

A must [...]

@graemerocher just tweeted about the Nuts Grails plugin which provides web based IDE from within your Grails application. Talk about eating

For those using Grails 1.1 already there’s a new command line argument for testing which re-runs only tests which previously failed.
grails test-app -rerun
Thanks to @wangjammer5

My friend and associate Chris Pitts, an Agile Coach in London, has weighed in on the ongoing debate about software craftsmanship.
Chris is focused on trying to move the debate from just being open to interpretation toward specific codes – as drawn from other present day crafts such as carpentry, surgery, architecture/building and so on. 
He proposes that [...]

Gus Power and Kris Lander of EnergizedWork just presented ‘No Excuses: Concept to Cash Every Week‘ at QCon London which highlights the manner by which development is executed within the EnergizedWork stable. 
It’s worth reviewing the slides (available via ‘No Excuses’ link above) to get a sense of how using such methods can help achieve the [...]