Moved!

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

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!

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.

RubyConf Registration is open!

And yours truly is registered.

Now, anybody looking for a roomie/carpool?

Gradual Agile

This week's Agile RTP meeting will feature local speaker & ARTp founder, Jared Richardson. Jared is a fascinating speaker, so I would highly recommend this talk. He'll be doing one of his talks from the NFJS tour, but you get to see it for free.

The topic is Gradual Agile. If you've ever wanted to introduce Agile at your shop (and, unless you're already Agile, why wouldn't you??), this is the talk for you; coming from a guy who actually did just that.

It's Tuesday night (unless you're reading this within a half hour after I post it - that's tonight!) at 7pm at Misys Healthcare in Raleigh. More info here.

Hope to see you there!

Do you care about software?

You should.

RichFaces - it just works

At my current gig, we are using JSF, which is a pretty complicated framework, IMHO. I've recently enjoyed playing with the RichFaces libraries. We had a need come up to put a popup date picker on one of our pages (itself, embedded inside a popup). I scoured the web, looking at various implementations and didn't find one that satisfied me. The various *Faces implementations were overly-complicated to get working in our current tech stack. I found an okay JS implementation, and was about to wire that in, when I noticed that the new version of RichFaces (which I found mentioned in the user forums) had a calendar component. So, I grabbed the latest snapshot, dropped the jars in place (okay, I deleted the old jars and dropped the jars in place, since the new version of RichFaces was merged with Ajax4JSF, which we were also using). Put in a single line: <rich:calendar />, and voilà, I had a working calendar component. Slick.

I just want to say thank you to the RichFaces/Ajax4JSF team(s), this library has been great for doing rich UI in our JSF app. With the Red Hat Developer Studio coming along nicely, this could turn into quite a nice environment for developing web apps.

Of course, I plan on doing Rails development next month; but there is hope for the Java guys.