Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Moved!

Now that I've got Mephisto setup, I've started blogging over at Agile Disciple. Please update your subscription!

Tuesday, November 6, 2007

History of Agility

Tonight at the Agile RTP meetup, Rick DeNatale gave us a nice walkthrough of the History of Agility, or more precisely, the pre-history of Agility as he put it.

One of the interesting points he made was that in the early days of programming, things were more Agile. For example, they had the "punch card rooms," where programmers would all be in the same room working on problems together. And after that they had Terminal rooms (which I experienced in college) - again collocated programmers.

It wasn't until someone (IBM?) commissioned a study where one of the conclusions was that the optimum setup for a programmer was in an office with a window, all by himself. Of course, for many programmers, this has turned into a small cubicle in the middle of a farm.

Rick had quite a bit of information, and that from someone who actually lived through much of this history. And hey, I won an IPod shuffle!

Monday, November 5, 2007

Top Ten Moments at RubyConf 2007

10. Twitter-net 
9. Getting my picture taken with Adam Keys.
8. Winning a game of Werewolf as a seer.
7. Watching Sam Stephenson nearly win the "experts" no-reveal game of Werewolf.
6. Matz's Python shirt.
5. Evan's Rubinius talk.
4. Marcel's beard.
3. The Story Runner from Chelimsky and Astels
2. Refactotum showing me how easy it is to contribute to random open source projects.
1. Laurent's presentation on "Mac OS X loves Ruby."


And how about an Anti-Top list of moments?
The elevators.
Seating during lunch.
Room 2 having some of the most popular talks.
LowFi network.