Jake Scruggs

The Chicago Tribune wrote up an article about the craftsman swap I participated in 2 months ago: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-mon-craftsman-swap-0615-jun15,0,1513297.story My thoughts on it are here: http://jakescruggs.blogspot.com/search/label/craftsman_swap Basically Obtiva and 8th Light exchanged developers for a week. If you want to know more (and why) click on the links above.

Day Five of the Craftsmanship Swap : Last day! Today started off with some more work on a soon to be released 8th Light project that will hopefully make them some money. Colin and I had a good time blowing up the app and making sure a notification email gets sent out using Exception Notifier . Later on, at a retrospective, Paul asked me if I thought it would make any money and I said that I had no idea but it was worth it even if all they got out of it was some greenfield experience for Eric and Colin. Oftentimes when you're a new developer you get told what to do. But this project, although managed by Micah, has mostly been programmed by Eric and Colin. Which is awesome. It's a real app that will go into production and charge credit cards, but it's small and simple enough that they could write every line. There's a lot of 10 year veterans of the industry who've never had that sort of start to finish experience and I think it's cool they're getting it...

Day Four of the Craftsmanship Swap : Today started with Eric Smith and I working an iPhone version of Conway’s Game of Life trying to be as test first as possible. It was... Painful. I've been spoiled by my time with Ruby into expecting first class testing/mocking/stubbing. Even working with a guy who's given talks on how to test drive iPhone apps there was still a lot of wasted time scratching our heads, hand writing mocks/stubs, and f-ing around with clicking and dragging lines from one box to another. We got interrupted mid-morning by some production issues in a large Rails application 8th Light maintains/ develops. We had to write a script to find some bad data and fix it so I got to use one of my favorite tricks to mark the progress of a long running process: 10.times do sleep 1 print "." STDOUT.flush end If you don't put in the "STDOUT.flush" all the dots come out altogether at the end, but with the flush you get a nice dot to tell you every ...

Day Three of the Craftsmanship Swap : Micah and Paul had to head out of town for an Iteration Planning Meeting/Demo so it was just Colin Jones, Eric Meyer, and I in the office. We decided to do some tri-ping pong development on an internal product 8th Light is planning to release soon. So Eric would write a test/spec, I'd make it pass and write another spec, then Colin would make my spec pass and write one for Eric and the whole process would repeat. An enjoyable way to work made easier by their 24inch Cinema Displays and wireless keyboards. I've noticed that everybody shakes hands at 8th Light. A lot. When someone arrives in the morning the new person tends to shake the hands of all who are already there. The same thing happens when someone leaves for the day. I asked Colin and Eric about the origins of this but they had no answers for me. It seems kind of weird, but it's also sort of a cool affirmation of camaraderie. It may just be better than the grunt I give p...

Day Two of the Craftsmanship Swap : The day started off with a bit of work on slim for C with Doug Bradbury . Slim is a replacement for Fit which underlies Fitnesse and you need to write one for every language you plan to use FitNesse on. I gave it my best shot , but then Uncle Bob (Bob Martin - father of 8th Light founder Micah Martin) and James Grenning showed up. Great to see those guys -- I don't think I've seen James since my days of apprenticeship at Object Mentor . They are crazy better at C than I am so they worked with Doug while I paired with Micah on drving that ui through Fitnesse (which I talked about yesterday ). We made some pretty good progress but he had some meetings to attend so I got to work with 8th Light's newest apprentice: Colin Jones . Guess what he was working on? Tic Tac Toe. That takes me back. 5 years ago almost to the month, Micah had me write a Tic Tac Toe program to see if I had the skills to become an Object Mentor apprentice. Well...

Day One of the Craftsmanship Swap : Today Micah and I paired on test driving a user interface through FitNesse . The UI in question is a JRuby rich client application that had reached the point where they wanted to have some acceptance tests that fire it up, click around, and assert that things are where they should be. We used DRb to stow away a reference to the application when it started up and then we could make the application dance. If you haven't used DRb it's yet another deceptively simple and powerful Ruby tool. Check this out: ~ $ irb >> require 'drb' => true >> object = "hello" => "hello" >> DRb.start_service('druby://localhost:9001',object) => # >> ref = DRbObject.new(nil, 'druby://localhost:9001') => # >> ref.size => 5 >> ref.to_s => "hello" Stick any object in and then another Ruby process can pick it up and do stuff with it. Neat. I noticed 8th Light...