Musings of a Software Development Manager

Not too long ago a local recruiter noted at a JUG meeting:
“I don’t care what else you have on your resume, but you have to have Spring and Hibernate. I know it was all EJB and SOA just a few years ago, but now if you don’t have Spring/Hibernate you’re not getting past [...]

A few weeks ago at the local Ruby Users Group meeting there was a suggestion of actually writing some code at the meeting. The suggestion was to use a Ruby Quiz exercise. It was quiz #16, a Rock, Paper, Scissors simulation. We broke up into small groups of about three people, coded for [...]

Recently I’ve been catching up with the Ruby world again in my limited spare time. I had an idea for a fun little hobby project, but I wanted to actually do it BDD style and in Rails 2. I dug a bit into RSpec again and realized they had a new BDD tool [...]

I hopped over to http://rubyonrails.org about 7:40pm PST and found this surprise. After a few tries I confirmed it looks like they there’s a real issue. This is decidedly not what I was expecting. Hopefully it’s fixed soon.

Automated testing is one of the most important parts of software development, and yet until now, we haven’t mentioned it. Testing a piece of software relies on a thorough understanding of the tools you are using, and designing tests can be far more difficult (and enjoyable) than writing the code itself.
– Head First Rails [...]

Some recent signs of continuous testing coming to Java land:

Grails 1.1 features 9 new features including #9 Continuous Testing.
Kent Beck is developing JUnit Max an Eclipse plug-in that runs tests in the background optimizing for the tests that are most likely to break.

Autotest was a joy to use when I got to spend more time [...]

I haven’t really spent a lot of time with RSpec since about the 0.5 release. I took a tutorial class with Dave Astels and got jazzed about the opportunity since they were really able to leverage Ruby to make a nice BDD framework. After using RSpec all JUnit test methods started including should. [...]

According to xUnit Test Patterns:

The Ruby-based RSPec kicked off the reframing of TDD to EDD (example-driven development), and the Java-based JBehave followed shortly afterword.

- xUnit Test Patterns pg 33

Actually JBehave predated RSpec by a few years. I remember going to a talk by Dan North of Thoughtworks on JBehave in March of 2005. [...]

It’s like Java Posse for Rails Developers only shorter, funnier, and tightly scripted.
The Rails Envy guys, Gregg and Jason, have put together a great podcast on current Rails news, packed it into 10 minute episodes and spiced it up with humor. You probably already know them from their parodies of the Mac [...]

Sacramento’s Ruby community is beginning to organize for regular meetings. Our first meeting about three months ago was more of a introduction and chat session. Several members had been to Rails Conf 2007 and had plenty to talk about.
We met again at Invision in Old Sacramento and talked about some organizational items:

Ryan is [...]