December 14th, 2009 — Planet
According to last week's Economist, the United States Air Force are buying 2,200 units of Sony PlayStation 3. The idea is to get a cheap hardware (subsidized by SONY as their actual revenue comes from selling the games), install Linux and have a super-powerful cluster at 10% of the normal cost. I've had a similar idea last year - coming out the economic boom left me with number of spare notebooks and number of customer needing a server but with advancing recession with less and less money for a new one. Out of necessity I set up temporary servers using my spare laptops. While I did expect some problems - like failing hard drives, performance issues and so on... surprisingly enough 1 year later not one of those laptops/servers failed. Not only that - I even found the performance on a par with my other
regular servers.
That got me thinking...according to the Moore's law the computing power is doubling fast enough to make last month's average laptop faster than last year's high end server. Over the years I've worked with number of servers and number of brands - from Dell, through HP, Compaq to NEC. Strangely enough, no matter how expensive the server (or any computer for that matter) - the only sure thing is that it will break. E.g. I use MacBook Pro 17" that cost me over $5,000. Yet, everything (with the exception of keyboard) has already failed and I spent on repairs more than the initial amount. Just the display with the motherboard was more than $4,000. The worst thing about it was that every time something happened the notebook spent at least a month (up to 2 months) in the workshop. My old Dell notebook broke down just as much and it used to be very frustrating to wait until the next business day for technician to come to my office and fix it. Having to actually go to the workshop, spend 1 hour there + 1 hour on the way and have your bloody expensive notebook taken for a month... Anyway, the point is that even my high end servers fail. I once had 4 out of 5 hot-swap SCSI drives fail at the same time. Another time just 3 of them did. At the end I found it much more important to prepare for the hardware failure than trying to prevent it.
Coming back to the cheap notebooks - you can get a reasonably good notebook with 4GB RAM for around $800. With Dell's next business day service (or even better the 4 hour service) you pretty much don't have to worry about it for the next 2 or 3 years. Should anything happen you can simply swap it for a spare one. This actually addresses whole set of points and issues I face with conventional servers. The installation and troubleshooting usually requires a senior person going onsite wasting at least half a day. The notebooks, on the other hand, can be pre-installed in the office and simply delivered to the customer by a junior staff who just needs to plug it to the network and everything is done. I still remember moving 4U servers (54kg each) a few years back. This obviously requires a proper backup strategy. The software part of which (i.e. what to backup and when and how and offsite strategy) is the same as on a regular server. For faster recovery in notebook servers I clone the drive to an external USB drive and have the backup copied also on this external drive (pgpool-II is really great for this). The cloning can actually be automated on monthly or weekly basis to have a reasonably fresh image on the external drive. If the drive fails (by far the most common thing on my servers as well as notebooks) all that needs to be done is to replace the drive. This takes a couple of minutes on my Dell and Compaq notebooks and even a non-technical person can do it. Once the system is back on-line, with everything installed and the backup conveniently on the drive, it takes less than 5 minutes to restore the database and deploy the latest revision of the system. And of course, can be done from anywhere.
I am not saying that notebook servers are fit for every situation - I am only saying that they're fit for most of our customers - situations where there's limited number of users (typically around 30 - 50) and most of them in the same location. While the internet connection for businesses in SG is as slow as it is expensive, it still still usable for even several offices accessing the system. I am still finding it hard to understand why in such a high tech place like SG it costs around $100 a month to get 100MB downstream/10MB upstream for residential connection yet it costs over $200 to get 1.5MB down/374kB for the office. There's so many initiatives for bringing internet to consumers - from free Wireless@SG, through iCell's lighting up East Cost Park and food courts, internet on the buses to great quality and dirt cheap 3G internet (I pay $20 for 50GB a month) - yet there is very little for the content providers. There's been a big push coming from government and SingTel for cloud computing. I haven't really heard of any local cloud provider worth mentioning - there are several offering either ridiculously high prices or ridiculously low specs or both. We've been using Rackspace's cloud servers ever since they became available - besides the lowest price they offer really great support - yet I've been moving more and more customers away to the notebook servers - from the peak of 19 servers I now only have 4 left. The main reason is actually price/performance ratio. My usual application requires (at least) 1GB memory instance the price of which comes to around S$70 (around 50 USD) which comes to around S$800 a year. The problem is that 1MB instance is sufficient only for average performance - it is not enough during peaks - and even small performance hiccups during peak result in great frustrations for the users. As S$1000 can buy you a 4GB Dell with next day on-site service for 2 years - it's quite compelling - especially when budgets are tight.
November 29th, 2009 — Planet
I don't know what is wrong with me but, somehow, I ended up on an underdog technology again. With the recent and still fragile recovery of the economy we've seen a lot of interest for mobile access to our applications. As our applications are web based the basic access is there but with more and more sophisticated smartphones just simplified CSS and layout that fits the small screen doesn't cut it anymore.
I've been using iPhone for quite some time now. Besides the usual stuff everybody would do I also spent some time testing out the API for the kind of boring business applications we do. While the basic search/form screens are pretty easy to do (I can hardly imagine a platform where that would be difficult) I hit quite a number of problems with more complicated apps. While most of those issues disappeared on a jail-broken phone, I can foresee some resistance asking my customers to jailbreak their 20 phones. Technology issues aside there's still a major problem with distribution. Pretty much the only way to effectively distribute the iPhone applications is through AppStore, which may not be the most ideal way for our kind of applications used by a few people. While there is an enterprise license that allows private AppStore it's available for companies with minimum of 500 employees...
Thanks to the CodeXtreme competition I got to play with Android. Of course, it doesn't feel as 'cool' as iPhone...which, luckily is not so much of an issue with enterprise apps. Despite the fact I was happily (almost) Java-free for the past 4 years I found the java based development to be a positive thing. Not only because Java has become THE language at universities around and even fresh grads don't feel totally lost and overwhelmed by a completely new language and environment but I actually found it quite efficient for writing our kind of apps. There's already quite a number of open source apps around that can help with inspiration or solutions to many problems. To mention freedom...Android allows me to do whatever I need or want without any artificial restrictions. I have to do whatever the customers require and it's quite enough to fight with actual constrains, like screen size, Internet connection, GPS timeouts without having to worry about someone's idea of what should or should not be allowed. On top of all that Android not only allows me to do whatever I want - it actually allows me to deploy my apps. The distribution channel is open (not to mention free). While I understand the arguments for AppStore as a guardian of purity and quality of distributed applications...it's not really workable or applicable in my business.
My point is that just like with many other technologies, smartphones are slowly moving from home user to corporate user. And corporate users have quite different needs and expectations. It's not so much about coolness and effects as it is about getting the job done. Whether it is to access CRM, process on-site sale, collect data, fleet/position monitoring, authenticate access... Currently, we're working on a few bigger projects with Android integration. Two of them are mostly for data collection. While data collection has been around since like forever - a simple integration of camera, barcode scanning support, GPS and immediate data update on the server gives it a completely different dimension. Instead of waiting months for the paper forms to be processed you have instant results with a lot of important metadata. You can immediately see the trends and adjust as you go. The rest of the applications we're working on utilize GPS (location based systems). Just recently, the government implemented a system for tracking social workers. They fixed an RFID tag on the doors of senior citizens that the social workers need to visit. The social workers are given portable RFID readers and on arrival to the place they scan the tag. On their return the scanned data is synchronized with the system to plot the social worker's visits. We've got similar requests from a number of companies - from courier companies, through transportation companies to pretty much any company that provides delivery or onsite services. In many such cases it's not an option to use RFID (aircond repair shop can hardly put RFID tag on all their customers doors). While there are solutions for fleet tracking, the cost of $200 per vehicle per month is not only too much for a small company but it's also tied to a vehicle. While the AGPS is far from perfect even with all the timeouts and wrong position readings it still can provide quite accurate and very timely position.
The technology usually doesn't change in the vacuum. During the previous economic boom we were replacing DOS and Access based applications with web based systems thanks to the rise of cheap Internet and cheap portable computers. Most of our clients (especially business owners) didn't initially really grasp the advantage of being able to access their applications from anywhere - what really mattered at the end was that they could access it from home. After all, they've been working from the office their whole lives - as that's where all the resources and all the data were. Then they slowly started using the systems from outside the office...you know check customer's phone number, check the order status because they got a call from customer...soon they were leaving office early able to do parts of the work in evenings from living room, coming in late - being able to check sales, invoicing, bills, attendance, work orders or any other operational details from home just as well as from the office. Today, the same customers have smartphones...not just because it's cool - but because they can access their data from ANYWHERE...which is kind of cool, after all. The paradigm is shifting again.
November 27th, 2009 — Planet
Just a few days ago I was laughing at real-estate agents that they may soon be required to pass an entrance examination to test them in practical knowledge as well as moral soundness (out of curiosity will this be a multiple choice test?). While it was expected - they are pretty much the last profession without any education or knowledge required, yet they represent you on your single highest monthly expense (in SG). The fact that there is no law regulating the real estate market does not make the situation easier - it doesn't mean no law - nothing to know - everybody plays by they own rules. Two days later I stopped laughing...seems that we're next...
As I've said so many times on so many places, I really believe in professional certification (and I completely respect those who don't), however, it really matters how this certification is done. For that reason I (mostly) don't really care about academic (university) results as they mostly represent ability to know a little about many things but nothing about one thing. They are very important in other aspects, though. As explained in books like The Talent Code and Talent is Overrated I believe that to really know something you need to clock-in your 10,000 hours of practice. I teach ruby/rails programming in 2.5 days course and I am able to cover almost everything to get you started writing even ERP solution, but does that mean that after 2.5 days of intensive training you're proficient in ruby or rails? Yes - if you spend the next few years working with it.
As such I was first quite enthusiastic to read that the government is stepping in to regulate our profession as well. Thanks to the thousands of failed projects and millions of government money wasted they decided that the current practice of audit after the project completion is as effective in weeding out failing vendors as a postmortem is in weeding out smoking. While many times the problem is on both sides - the vendor's as well as the client's - the experience of the vendor can make up for a lot of issues on clients side. Most of our clients went through a software development experience once or twice in their lives - while we go through it every day. I am talking about SME market here - where the projects go anything but as planned. Running a small business is like yachting - constantly monitoring the wind, the sea and reacting to every small change - either capitalize on it or run from devastating effects. While it's essential to standardize the processes - otherwise there's no business to run - you have to be ever ready to unfreeze the process adjust and freeze again. And your IT infrastructure either moves with you or against you. That's why the SME landscape looks so different to government regulated, without exception SAP dominated MNC market.
Back to certification, imagine my surprise to find out that the certification has been outsourced to an NGO that specializes in Microsoft certification. In fact, they do exclusively Microsoft certification and now this. First I thought, this may not be so bad - I can surely brush up on some VB craft if that's what it takes to be professional in 2010. But it gets worse. There is no preparation and there is no exam. Your professional level is black box decided solely based on 4,000 words self assessment essay of your past 6 years. No interview, no actual review of your work - 4,000 words of narration. On top of this you of course have to sign up for membership in this great organization because the certificate is only valid with a paid membership. Talk about business model - the costs - read a short essay - the revenue $800 for reading and $100 every year after. And since it's becoming a government requirement - not only the new members HAVE to come to you - even the old ones HAVE to stay - a truly new level of marketing and retention. I think universities have a lot to learn here - imagine your degree is valid so long that you pay a yearly fee. But I understand - even NGOs have to make money - and if you liken it to bar certificates lawyers have to pay every year it's not even so unusual. What still worries me a little is that Microsoft is to decide my professional level. I have a great respect for them - the company as well as the products. The problem is that I simply slipped during university and I somehow didn't get to back the right path ever since. I can only imagine a Microsoft grown professional reading my essay - my master thesis was on open source (this was back in 2000 when open source was fairly new to the business as well as academia). Besides having converted number of companies data centers from windows to linux with the exception of 1 software project all the others were done using non-microsoft technologies like Ruby, Java, Python, PostgreSql. If it was not enough we've been pioneering agile methodologies since maybe 2002 - I have not worked on waterfall model project since 2001.
Some of my friends actually suggested to write the essay as I normally would and then simply search and replace...Linux for windows, posgresql for MS Sql, java for J++, ruby for VB.net or C#, agile for waterfall.
Don't get me wrong - I am all for professional certification. All the other professions have it - so why not us. Lawyers have to pass the bar, accountants have ACCA and CPA, doctors have their attestations, even my mother as a teacher has to get recertified every 2 years. Even not so knowledge intensive professions have certifications - e.g. taxi drivers here are tested on the knowledge of the shortest path between any two points in Singapore. Of course, all those tests are considered only a prerequisite for practice - nobody really things that passing a bar will make you Allan Shore or Denny Crane. What it does is that it gives you guarantee that your lawyer or your doctor or your accountant achieved certain industry recognized standard and passed independent assesment. Why is independence of this assesment so important? After all, market numbers (or any numbers for that matter) clearly show that MS knows best how to do things. How would you like if every doctor would have to be certified by Pfizer or Merck or whoever had the best market numbers last year? Every doctor has to use their drugs anyway...
I definitelly think the governmet deserves a lot of credit for trying to improve current situation. Maybe it won't be as simple as appointing one company to award black box professional certifications...but it certainly is a step forward. And of course I know it won't be so hard...we'll all have to pass it after all.
July 4th, 2009 — Planet
A few years ago I used to be quite active in Rails community and then I stopped. I haven't been to a Singapore ruby/rails community meet up for 2 years and many of my friends ask me why - if I completely moved from Ruby to Python or simply what happened. Even though, I spend more and more time working with Python, I am still spend 13 - 14 hours a day doing Ruby programming. The actual reason has much more to do with Rails
positioning. Back in April 2007, when the Singapore rails community was just starting to form and we had our first bigger meeting I wrote about it
here. Most of it is now irrelevant but I was quite surprised when I read my 2nd point - purpose of the meetings - especially the part about the community divide to
free hackers and
enterprise developers. Back then I believed both were good and necessary for the community. I still believe it today only the situation has changed. While back then it was pretty much balanced, most of the community today consists of free hackers. After Dave Thomas moved from programming to music (okay - from rails to ruby 1.9) there hasn't been anybody to represent the enterprise interest and the rails community and rails image evolved to a cool web 2.0 free hacker paradise with little interest in enterprise.
This became very clear thanks to
Bob Martin's key note on RailsConf '09 and very nice
rebuttal by DHH. Actually I've listened to that key note for several times now - Robert Martin is so expressive and (using the Smalltalk parallel) so diplomatic delivering something so critical to the community. For the past year and a half, I've been fighting with so many of the things he mentions - so many things I couldn't understand but make so much more sense now.
It makes so much sense what he says about arrogance - I usually call it the 'cool' factor. Not doing the dirty job and only doing the clean things. Belief that our tools are somehow better, that our language is so good that we don't have to follow the rules, we don't have to do the regular (enterprise) things. It may be one of the reasons why Ruby still doesn't have a proper PDF or Excel handling libraries. The problem here is that this kind of arrogance is usually very subtle - but hits really hard and on places you would never expect.
Rails is too easy to make a mess. This single statement pretty much sums up everything I said last week about software development being hard. Yes Rails is easy - in fact so easy that it makes you believe there is nothing you couldn't fix overnight. It's so easy that it makes you believe you don't need to know anything else. The problem is that all that ignorance will come back 3 months down the road (hopefully you'll be able to quit and let somebody else handle the mess).
Clean code. You look at the method it's pretty much what you'd expect.
TDD. As a programmer I pretty much grew up on books and blogs of people like Martin Fowler, Robert Martin, Dave Thomas, Kent Beck and others from the group. TDD was the only way I was able to work. TDD is a No 1 book on my list of books for beginners. Yet I've been having the hardest time selling TDD - even to my own employees. They all know they HAVE to do tests - but only very few of them do it voluntarily or really understand why. TDD is simply not a culture around here (SG) - in fact, many find TDD culturally insensitive - at best a nice theory but totally useless in practice - just go through the Singapore ruby mailing list. Sensitive or not - it made it to our contracts for software developers.
Lastly, the discussion goes to software development as a profession and to what constitutes the professional portion of our job. Surprisingly enough, Robert Martin seems to think it's the discipline, rules and principles, it's the tough things we have to do and it's keeping them up when the pressure of a deadline mounts. While there are people that are against being professional (see the DHH's rebuttal), for many people around me it makes sense. It seems so obvious that no body is really doing it.
June 27th, 2009 — Planet
This is something that's been bothering me for the longest time. And
NOT because I want to feel good about myself telling others how hard my job/work is. The reason is quite opposite. Our company has gone through expansion and shrinking cycle for several times. Each time we change a few things, achieve better results but frankly nowhere near the
ideal situation. The last time round we came up with some important
structural changes, but it doesn't really stop there. Given an appropriate and workable structure, the next question is: what kind of people are we looking for? What are the hard skills and what are the soft skills they should have? What should their
motivation be?
Long time ago I wrote about
10 books to start learning software development. It was an attempt to address the fundamental areas of software development - to take a side in plethora of different possible approaches to them and say this is how we do it here. I really didn't mean to say read those 10 books and you're a top class software developer. I used to start my Ruby on Rails trainings with the following picture:
I found the picture somewhere on the net - but as an ex-java developer I owned and read every single book from the stack (even though I ditched Struts for Spring in 2003 so my stack would have Spring books instead of struts). The ruby stack is pretty much all that was available back then. It would be very nice to think that after reading 2 books you'll know everything you need to know :-). Just for the record, my ruby and rails collection today has exactly 25 books plus a Ruby on Rails Essential Training from Linda.com. Regardless of which stack you're looking at, however, the fundamental problem with the picture is that those books will teach you only very small portion of what you need to know - they only cover 1 area of software development (to be fair the java stack has books on some of the other aspects). They only teach you the language but they are not making you a programmer - just like knowing all 12 notes doesn't make you a musician and being able to write doesn't make you a writer. You still have to add a stack on patterns and principles, databases, testing, basic design, HTML+CSS, object oriented analysis and design, agile techniques and practices, meta-programming, deployment and other aspects. It's extremely important to say that those books are not novels you don't just read them - you really have to work with them, do the examples, play with it try it in different scenarios - basically deep practice with them. Reading in a few hours is totally useless and waste of time.
This is what you have to spend your first 10,000 hours on.
The problem is that after those 10,000 hours you only know HOW ... you still don't know WHAT - a.k.a. the domain. Depending on your job this can very narrow or very broad or your every project may be in a different domain. That's not to say that you have to become a domain expert in every domain - but you can hardly write an accounting software if you refuse to learn about invoices, receivables, GL postings, financial statements and so on. While in traditional model there's system architect (or designer) that is expected to define everything to the last step with screen layouts and function of the last button and programmer simply translates the UML diagrams to code agile models require a very opposite approach. Software developer is no longer just shoveling coal from one pile to another. Instead, he/she is an active part of the development process - sitting with customers, communicating and shaping the final product.
For example, when I was working on my first inventory control system I spent 7 months in the warehouse doing every role from unloading the deliveries from suppliers, preparing deliveries to customers, picking the stock for walk-in customers, through weekly stock checks representing the logistics department on management meetings. I was even a delivery boy for several days to understand what the drivers go through. Doing accounting systems I was a part of accounting department from data entry clerk, going through the end of the month salary preparation stress, working on financial statements for management and going through audits - working with auditors to understand what they need and what's the best way to present it to them. You may say it's totally crazy - and to be perfectly frank many of my (ex)employees do - you did not finish university to be some store clerk and if you wanted to be an auditor you would have studied finance - not programing. As one of my ex-employee (he used to liken himself to Douglas Crockford) put it - I am a luminary programmer - I cannot care about invoices and whatever other domain nonsense.
The problem is that our customers don't give a damn about how luminary programmers we are. They don't know the difference between Java or Ruby, Rails or Spring, Apache or Tomcat. In fact, a few years back when I said I was programming in Java one of my customer asked if it's not too expensive to fly to Java every week and asked if it's because of the environment or cheap massages. They don't need a drill - they need holes. I have long 3 - 5 hours meetings with customers every day but we don't talk about programming - we talk about their issues and their problems. It's about understanding those problems and finding a solution - yet I could hardly find a solution if I had no idea what they're talking about. Problem is that many programmers I know don't even have any interest to understand.
To say it differently - not so long ago I spent 9 months in a restaurant - doing everything from serving, cashier, bar-tending to helping in the kitchen. Kitchen is a single THE most stressful place in the restaurant. Surprisingly the difference between great chefs, mediocre chefs and fired-in-3-days chefs wasn't how well they could fry the fish or roast the beef or how they're goulash tasted - in one word how well they could COOK. They all had to be able and were able to cook. The difference was in preparation. Great chefs would come in as early as 7am and started by cleaning the kitchen, they personally received all the deliveries checking the quality of everything - pretty much smelling every tomato, fish or pork chop. They would check they tools, go through the dishes, cutlery, prepare the condiments and just before opening for lunch sweep the restaurant floor one more time and check every single table one more time just to make sure that it's all perfect and ready. In the afternoon break they would talk to suppliers prepare samples and work on improvements. Mediocre chefs would turn up around 11:00 just in time to defrost the fish heat up the soup and have a cigarette. In the afternoon break they'd be sleeping in the office - because legally, it was they're break.
The software development is very hard - but not because of programming. Being able to program doesn't make you a great programmer just like being able to cook doesn't make you a great chef. It's a given that programmer should be able to write a clean code with tests. What sets them apart is how they approach the other aspects - especially the low glam aspects. I realize that all that I just said goes right against the core values of Rails framework and general perception of Rails. After four years in rails I am very sure I am not a COOL developer working on the next, much COOLER Google or Facebook or Web 3.75 webapp. We do clinically uncool systems - dare I say the word enterprise systems and only a part of the work is actual programming.
I started by asking about motivation - now looking back at what I said - one would have to be crazy just to do all that stuff once - what kind of an insane person would suffer through all this learning and then suffer again on every project (not even mentioning finish stress and starting stress and stress during every iteration - considering a good project is never finished it's like a living organism). Now imagine you find this kind of person, after all there all sorts of crazy people around (like climbers, actors, musicians, etc.) that go through a similar ordeal - how would you pay them? If a fresh grad without any experience asks for $6,000 because he has an option of stress free MNC job (at least here they do) - what can you offer? Martin Fowler once said that they start charging clients on 1 million - when it runs out they charge again. We're almost there - but not quite yet :-)
Last week I read
Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin. There is a section dedicated to the the motivation of top performers which is very interesting - so I'll come back with more on this topic (hopefully) soon.
April 28th, 2007 — Planet
I finished my first commercial Ruby on Rails application in October 2005 and I've been using it ever since. For most of this time, we've been one of the very very few offering Ruby on Rails in Singapore. Most of our customers are not exactly technical so they wouldn't really care even if we used Cobol :-). What they did care about was the price and delivery time. I don't know why, but writing about advantages of Ruby (and Ruby on Rails) comes very unnatural to me. It feels like saying what everybody knows. At the very minimum, most of the technical people have heard about it – whether they like it or hate it at least the don't go like “You're programming in WHAT???”
The situation seems to be turning even in this part of the world. Thanks to Ruby brigade I met a handful of Ruby on Rails programmers and a few handfuls of wannabes. After almost 2 years in isolation it was really great to see and meet Ruby programmers (other then my own trainees and employees :-). While all this was nice, what really made an impact was ever increasing demand for corporate training. More and more big companies approach me with corporate trainings. The reason is simple...as many are parts of global corporations, many of their internal systems were created elsewhere and now they need a local support. It may come as a shock that MNCs use other systems than just SAP, but it seems to be easier and way cheaper to use a few smaller, independent systems for handling a portion of daily operation.
I started my first Ruby course in April 2005 and for the past 6 months I spent roughly 40% of my time doing training. This has been a major shift for me as only as recently as 1 year back I spent around 90% programming and only 10% on other stuff. I started training in Changi prison and it's almost unbelievable how rewarding this experience has been. I cannot even describe how much the guys have changed. When I walked there the first time I sure saw the potential – around 30 guys doing (or more fighting) with every possible limitation you can think of but still determined to succeed. It may be an old truth that you will appreciate the value of something only after you've lost it but it's really valid. All of the ubiquitous things like Internet connection, access to new books, access to community support (reading the posts or posting questions) – all this is off limits in prison. And yet I didn't find any surviving broken existence in there. So many times I have wished my own employees showed half of the determination, zeal and persistence I could see in there. The more you have, the more you start taking things for granted and the more comfortable you become.
What I felt the guys needed was just better resources and some direction (IT wise). We went through some really tough time – I still remember explaining recursion for the whole Sunday, OOP, TDD and many other things. Well, none of them had any prior formal IT education. But then, maybe it was more to their advantage. Most of the time I find it much harder to work with computer science graduates than with people who never studied IT but have some logical and mathematical thinking. It's surprising how difficult it is to unlearn all the coding cowboy habits as opposed to just starting afresh. This is not to say that OOP or Ruby or design patterns or TDD or agile methodologies or anything else I do is the only way (or that it's correct at all). It's just one of the ways and the one I happened (in reality it took much more then just happen :-) to believe in – but more about that in my other blog posts. Anyway, it's really great to walk in there now. It's completely a different crowd – you see people being able to think, to analyze and to even transform all that into a working product. Sure it's not all wine and roses...but I would really like to see this kind of commitment in many other organizations I worked with.
I realized much of this when talking to people at one of the Ruby Brigade meetings. That's when I realized that I may be running quite a tight ship in regards to development principles – but so far I've really appreciated that nobody on my staff would say things like: “I do tests only when I feel like”, “I've never been into testing much”, “We do bug driven development”, “What's that 'assert' thing mean?” and many others.
To conclude with, I must say that I have always been an extremely fast learner – I've never had problem to learn anything but it's a completely different ball game to teach what you know. One thing is to look at something and understand it and a completely different one is to explain it to somebody else. And I really love it :-). And it finally gives me a reason to start working on my e-learning platform I've been planning since high school.
