Kerry Buckley

What’s the simplest thing that could possibly go wrong?

BVB: Big Visible Belly graph
21 December 2006

Testing java code using rspec and jruby

Now that rspec runs under jruby, and with a few hours to spare, I thought I’d have a play.

[Update:] I’ve simplified the import of java.util.Date following a suggestion in a comment (from Charles Oliver Nutter, no less!). I also noticed that I wasn’t using rspec’s setup properly (or at all), so I’ve tweaked the samples a little. I haven’t got the code here to try out, so there may be typos.

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21 December 2006

Getting the most from scrums/stand-ups

Jeremy Stell-Smith's says, in a post about Stand ups as Huddles:

I’m actually not a big fan of the traditional yesterday – today – issues format. I find that too often it becomes a status meeting – this is what I did yesterday, doing more of the same today, and no issues.

We've found the same thing, and tried (with limited success) to apply some of the traditional retrospective questions to the daily stand-up, so What did you do yesterday? should include What did you learn yesterday, and What's holding you up? should include What's still puzzling you?.

The other important thing is to jot down things you think of during the day that you want to mention at the stand-up, otherwise (particularly if you have a memory like mine) you end up going round the circle and waiting while everyone says "I'm sure I did something yesterday... let me think...".

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21 December 2006

More Google reader neatitude

A couple of other neat features that have made me glad I switched:

Shared items

You can mark individual items in your subscribed feeds as 'shared', and they become available on a public page. Like-minded people can then subscribe to your shared items feed, instead of you having to keep forwarding them links. I've added a link to my shared items over there on the left.

Starred items

Like many of you (I'm pretending here that people actually read this: humour me!), I keep a bookmark folder where I drop things that look interesting but that I don't have time to read straight away. The problem is that it doesn't help much when I see something at work that I want to read properly at home (or vice versa). Since most of them come from RSS feeds, all I need to do is click the star next to the item in Google reader, and it goes into a list that I can come back to later, rather than trying to remember which feed it was from. I guess many standalone RSS readers have a similar feature, but it comes into its own when you can access the list from anywhere.

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