Planet TW

Ye Zheng: 一个用C++实现的Dispatcher（二）

Fri, 10 Sep 2010 15:33:56 +0000

遗留代码就是遗留代码，总会有一些让人意想不到的地方，原以为所有消息都是由一个类（MsgHandler）处理的，可事实上，不是。

if (msg->id == "open") {

    MsgHandler handler(msg);

    handler.open();

} else if (msg->id == "close") {

    MsgHandler2 handler(msg);

    handler.close();

} else if (…) {

    …

} else {

    // exception handler

    …

}

上面的代码里面只有消息处理类的名字不同，其它的处理完全相同。不过，这样就让之前那个dispatcher就显得势单力薄。解决程序设计的问题，有一个很好用的处理手法：加个间接层。于是，

class DispatchHandler {

public:

    virtual void execute(Msg* msg) = 0;

};

对于前面的两种类型，道理上来说，我们需要分别为两个类型（MsgHandler和MsgHandler2）分别编写对应的子类。不过，我们用的是C++，是的，模板：

template<typename T>

class DispatchHandlerImpl : public DispatchHandler {

    typedef void (T::*Func)();

public:

    DispatchHandlerImpl(Func sourceHandler)

        :handler(sourceHandler) {}

    void execute(Msg* msg) {

        T msgHandler(msg);

        (msgHandler.*(this->handler))();

    }

private:

    Func handler;

};

原来的dispatcher也要相应的调整：

class MsgDispatcher {

public:

    ...

    void dispatch(Msg* msg);

private:

    map<string, DispatchHandler> handlers;

};

void MsgDispatcher::dispatch(Msg* msg) {

    DispatchHandler* handler = this->handlers[msg->id];

    if (handler) {

        handler->execute(msg);

    } else {

        // exception handler

        …

    }

}

对应的注册代码也就变成：

handlers["open"] = new DispatchHandlerImpl<MsgHandler>(MsgHandler::open);

handlers["close"] = new DispatchHandlerImpl<MsgHandler2>(MsgHandler2::close);

有代码洁癖的我们发现类名在这里重复了，于是，定义一个宏对其进行简化：

#define DISPATCH_HANDLER(className, funcName) \

DispatchHandlerImpl <className>(className::funcName)

handlers["open"] = new DISPATCH_HANDLER(MsgHandler, open);

handlers["close"] = new DISPATCH_HANDLER(MsgHandler2, close);

Ye Zheng: 一个用C++实现的Dispatcher（一）

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 15:04:41 +0000

又和一个团队合作，面前又摆着一堆分发的代码，不同的是，这次用的是C++：

if (msg->id == "open") {

    MsgHandler handler(msg);

    handler.open();

} else if (msg->id == "close") {

    MsgHandler handler(msg);

    handler.close();

} else if (…) {

    …

} else {

    // exception handler

    …

}

不要问我为什么不是每个消息对应一种处理类，要是知道为什么，就不是遗留代码了。于是，我们尝试着用C++写了一个dispatcher。下面是这个dispatcher的声明：

#include <map>

typedef void (MsgHandler::*handlerFunc)();

class MsgDispatcher {

public:

    ...

    void dispatch(Msg* msg);

private:

    map<string, handlerFunc> handlers;

};

因为要处理遗留代码，这里用到了指向成员函数的指针，也就提高了理解这段代码的门槛。具体实现如下：

void MsgDispatcher::dispatch(Msg* msg) {

    handlerFunc func = this->handlers[msg->id];

    if (func) {

        MsgHandler msgHandler(pkg);

        (msgHandler.*func)();

    } else {

        // exception handler

        …

    }

}

注册很简单：

handlers["open"] = MsgHandler::open;

handlers["close"] = MsgHandler::close;

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-08 [del.icio.us]

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

140 Characters

For nerds of a certain age.
What is Vince Cable really saying about how to make science cutbacks?
Open Library
DOS on Dope: The last MVC web framework you'll ever need

Siva Jagadeesan: sivajag

Thu, 09 Sep 2010 05:43:18 +0000

I was working on a feature that needed me to query nested map structure. I wanted to do it in a generic way. Amit pointed me to rql, a library for dealing with collections of records in clojure. I thought it will be helpful if I have something similar to rql for querying map, so I created mql.

Given a map

(def m
     {:cid
      {
       :visits {
                :id-1 {
                       :last-ts "1284166000040"
                       :first-ts "1274166000000"
                       :duration "40"}
                :id-2 {
                       :last-ts "1274166000040"
                       :first-ts "1274166000000"
                       :duration "40"}
                :id-3 {
                       :last-ts "1264166000040"
                       :first-ts "1274166000000"
                       :duration "40"}}

       :promo{
              :id-1 {:promo "p2"}
              :id-2 {:promo "p1"}}

       :purchase {
                  :id-1
                  {:order-id "order-id-1"
                   :total-dollars "970.00"
                   :purchase? "true",
                   :merchant-total-dollars "1000.00"}
                  :id-3
                  {:order-id "order-id-2"
                   :total-dollars "1000.00"
                   :purchase? ""
                   :merchant-total-dollars "1000.00"}}}})

Select: simple select

mql.core> (select [:cid :promo] m)
{:id-1 {:promo "p2"}, :id-2 {:promo "p1"}}

Select: with filtering

mql.core> (select [:cid :purchase] (where [* :total-dollars] :gt 980) m)
([:id-3 {:order-id "order-id-2", :total-dollars "1000.00", :purchase? "", :merchant-total-dollars "1000.00"}])

You can currently use :gt,:ge,:lt,:le and :eq as logical operators in where clause. In where clause for key-seq you can use * if a key is dynamic. The last key in where clause key-seq should not be *.

Limitations:

There could be only one * in Where Clause
Select clause cannot have * now

This is an early version of this library. It is doing what I need for now. So if you have any requirements/idea, you can send me a patch or let me know, I will hack when I get some free time.

Please feel free to send me your feedback on syntax, code style … etc

Filed under: Clojure Tagged: clojure, data structure, libraries

Hakan Raberg: Enumerable.java - Lambdas in Java 5 Today

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:22:25 +0000

Ruby/Smalltalk style internal iterators for Java 5 using bytecode transformation to capture expressions as closures.

http://github.com/hraberg/enumerable | 0.2.4 binary | 0.2.4 source | examples | readme

	int factorial = inject(ints, fn(n, m, n * m));

	Map<String, Integer> map = new HashMap<String, Integer>();

	eachWithIndex(strings, fn(s, idx, map.put(s, idx))); 	int x = 6;

	fn(n, x += n).call(2);

	assert x == 8;

Update

Mark Reinhold announced today that there will be no lambdas in Java, at least not until probably 2012. This doesn't come as a huge surprise after following the lambda-dev list for quite some time, even though I was a bit more optimistic. It seems Oracle has basically one guy dedicated to actually implementing the core of this, Maurizio Cimadamore. That is not an easy job, and he has my respect.

I would at this point seriously recommend using Scala, Clojure or JRuby for any greenfield development on the JVM. ThoughtWorks Technology Radar has had Java language, end of life as "Assess" for quite some time now, while still keeping JVM as a platform and JRuby as "Adapt".

But if you're still on Java 5, you could do worse than trying out Enumerable.java for your closure needs. I implemented it mainly during one month on the road, and it has since, sorry to say, gone silent while I've been moving back to work and live in London, currently maintaining a huge Spring application (but, also doing a healthy amount of Django).

But the unrealistic schedule of JDK 7 was exactly the reason I implemented Enumerable.java in the first place.

Mark Needham: Ruby: Checking an array contains an item

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:54:50 +0000

A couple of times in the past few days I've wanted to check if a particular item exists in an array and presumably influenced by working for too long with the .NET/Java APIs I keep expecting there to be a 'contains' method that I can call on the array!

More as an attempt to help myself remember than anything else, the method we want is actually called 'include?'.

Therefore…

[1,2,3].include?(2)
=> true

[1,2,3,4].include?(5)
=> false

One other quite neat thing is that we can use that in tests when we want to check that an array contains one item that we're expecting.

This is much better than having to specify a specific index which is what we often seem to end up doing in Java/C#.

We therefore end up with (RSpec) tests similar to this:

response.flash[:error].include?("Some error message").should be_true

Mark Needham: jQuery UI Tabs: Changing selected tab

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:32:37 +0000

We're using the tabs part of the jQuery UI library on the project I'm currently working on and one thing we wanted to do was change the default tab that was being selected.

The documentation suggested that one way to do this was to give the index of the tab we wanted selected when calling the tabs function:

$( ".selector" ).tabs({ selected: 3 });

Since we wanted to select the tab by name based on a value from the query string we thought it would probably be simpler if we could just set the selected tab using a css class.

Our initial thought was that we could put the 'ui-tabs-hide' class on the divs that we wanted to hide and then not put that class on the one that we wanted to show.

Unfortunately that didn't work and the first tab was still being selected…

We downloaded version 1.8.2 of the library via Google's CDN (which seems really cool!) and were able to see that our class was actually intentionally being removed!

10523
10524

if (o.selected >= 0 && this.anchors.length) { // check for length avoids error when initializing empty list
				this.panels.eq(o.selected).removeClass('ui-tabs-hide');

Luckily a little further down the file there is a comment which explains some other ways to manipulate the selected tab:

			// Selected tab
			// use "selected" option or try to retrieve:
			// 1. from fragment identifier in url
			// 2. from cookie
			// 3. from selected class attribute on <li>

We need to put the class 'ui-tabs-selected' on the appropriate <li> and then that will be the one that gets selected.

Ye Zheng: 一个用C实现的Dispatch框架

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 14:30:24 +0000

用条件语句做分发是一件很常见的事：

switch(msg->id) {

    case ID1:

        ID1Handler(msg);

        break;

    case ID2:

        ID2Handler(msg);

        break;

    ...

}

条件稍微多一些点，函数就会变得冗长不堪。有的团队会直接用if..else，进行判断，于是我们有幸知道了，VC不支持超过128个的选择分支。为了让这种代码的可维护性更好，我们做了一些尝试。

下面定义了一个dispatcher：

BEGIN_DISPATCHER(MSG, ID, MsgHandler)

    DISPATCH_ITEM(ID1, ID1Handler)

    DISPATCH_ITEM(ID2, ID2Handler)

END_DISPATCHER(PCU_DisasterHandler)

首先，用BEGIN_DISPATCH_MAP定义了这个dispatcher的名字（MSG），用做分发键值的类型（ID）和处理函数的类型（MsgHandler）。接下来，用DISPATCH_ITEM定义了几个分发项，也就是说，如果传入的值是ID1，会用ID1Handler进行处理，如果是ID2，则对应着ID2Handler。最后，用END_DISPATCH_MAP定义了一个错误处理函数。这样的话，就把使用的时候，就不必额外去做判空的操作了。这是Null Object模式的一种体现。

这个dispatcher的使用方式如下：

dispatch(to(MSG), with(msg->id))(msg);

这段代码的含义是使用MSG这个dispatcher，根据msg->id找到对应的处理函数，传入的参数是msg。

这个dispatch框架的实现如下：

#include <string.h>

#define SIZE_OF_ARRAY(array) sizeof(array)/sizeof(array[0])

/* dispatcher definition */

#define __DISPATCHER_NAME(name) __dispatcher_##name

#define __DISPATCH_ITEM_NAME(name) __dispatch_item_##name

#define __IsMatched(target, source) (0 == memcmp(&target, &source, sizeof(target)))

#define BEGIN_DISPATCHER(name, key_type, handler_type) \

    struct __DISPATCH_ITEM_NAME(name) {\

        key_type key;\

        handler_type *handler;\

    };\

    \

handler_type* __DISPATCHER_NAME(name)(key_type key) \

{\

    static struct __DISPATCH_ITEM_NAME(name) dispatchers[] = {\

#define END_DISPATCHER(disaster_handler) \

    };\

    int i;\

    int array_size = SIZE_OF_ARRAY(dispatchers); \

    for (i = 0; i < array_size; i++)\

    {\

        if (__IsMatched(dispatchers[i].key, key)) {\

            return dispatchers[i].handler;\

        }\

    }\

    return disaster_handler;\

}

#define DISPATCH_ITEM(key, handler) {key, handler},

#define DISPATCH_ITEM_2(key1, key2, handler) {key1, key2, handler},

#define DISPATCH_ITEM_3(key1, key2, key3, handler) {key1, key2, key3, handler},

#define dispatch(name, key) __DISPATCHER_NAME(name)(key)

#define to(name) name

#define with(key) key

从这里可以看出，定义dispatcher，实际上是定义了一个函数，这个函数的返回值是一个函数指针，而这个函数指针的类型是由handler_type定义的。这样的话，就解决了不同dispatcher之间函数参数不同的问题。

当然，这个处理里面采用了最简单的数组，在分发项不是很多的情况下是适用的。如果分发项较多，可以考虑改为map实现。另外，这里还运用了一些宏的技巧。在写应用代码时，我们并不鼓励多用宏。但写一些框架代码，为了提高使用上的表现力时，宏也会是一个利器。

如果有兴趣，欢迎讨论！

Prabin Deka: How to upload data stolen from the Net – for dummies**!

Wed, 08 Sep 2010 06:55:41 +0000

** If you are a cool professional Ruby programmer you might find all of this just a bit greenish.

We all have our pet web apps we work on whenever our day job does not get in the way. I have mine too. Many of these apps integrate various services over the web – like albums on Flickr. Well, every now and then I get a craving to actually put some usable data in my apps. I go around looking for that data on the net, which is followed by a moral debate with myself when I find some. Actually, it is not as bad as it sounds.

There is a lot of data that you can pick up legally – like the nutrient data that the Australian government publishes in one of it’s websites.

Data comes in various shapes and sizes. Tabular data that can be converted into CSV, which is sometimes the simplest to load. We all have done it a hundred times in projects. But here is how I did it.

It’s a simple approach. The script is fast enough for me. There are 4000 rows in the file and it takes about 20 sec to upload the same. That works for me.

You can off course avoid the first line using

You can also use FasterCSV and then avoid the first line using

That brings us to our next topic

Other alternatives to upload CSV

Here are some of the other alternatives…

Ruby String#split (slow)
Ruby CSV (slow)
FasterCSV (slow)
ccsv (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)
CSVScan (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)
Excelsior (fast & recommended if you have control over CSV format)

This data can be found here. There are some benchmarks of how fast each of the parser are in that website.

I like the simplicity of

What about other non-tabular data?

Well there is much to be had over the web. There is the RSS feed that you can do a lot with if a website is publishing an RSS. If not, well, there is screen scraping! Ever heard of that beast?! This is how I parsed and uploaded some RSS data some time ago.

Some months hence … and after a few more Railscast under my belt, I would use FeedZirra.

Do have a look at the github page here. You can then set up a call to FeedEntry.update_from_feed(“feed url”) in your crons, or use Whenever.

One is probably wasting a bit of bandwidth by the way, if you are doing this, cause you are downloading the whole feed, when there are means for you to just get what has changed. You can do this using…

Michael Long: Design a Media Collection (part 1)

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:16:58 +0000

To give you some context

The Northwest lifestyle has found its way into shopping malls by way of Eddie Bauer, and into record stores through the alternative rock scene. Daniel Cardenas of NWLive.TV wants to spread Northwest living through the Internet. With a camera in hand and adventure in his heart, Daniel travels between Portland, Oregon and Vancouver, BC tracking down and documenting Northwest artists and events with the wonderment of a young boy.

Daniel, on behalf of NWlive, has generated a lot of content over the past year. NWLive needs a flexible yet solid web content delivery platform; one that can grow in-step with the growing body of work.

Design for context and the rest will follow

This is a media collection, not a web log

There are many ways to display content: Chronologically, frequency of access, the source of the content. There are more ways to display content and its relationships to other content than any one person can imagine. This sentiment also goes for sharing content. The most readily accessible form of content sharing these days is the web log (blog). Blogs are great for journal style publishing whereby an author shares their thoughts, uploads a picture of their cat doing something cute, or posting a recipe for just about anything. Out-of-the-box, most web logs are organized chronologically with the most recent post first: One-dimensional content presentation. What if the content could be provided in multiple-dimensions? In how many other dimensions can we present NWLive’s content? How can we raise the bar and make the NWLive media collection less like a blog? And finally, how can we improve the discovery and retrieval of content in the media collection? The answer does not reside in the content itself, but in the context and the purpose for its use.

We can describe the context with the following activities and use cases for the NWLive media collection:

An office worker takes a break from the daily grind to watch short, yet entertaining media clips
An event attendee follows-up a few days later to relive highlights and reflect on their own experiences
An internet searcher explores a topic of interest and discovers some relevant media clips

Content Strategy

How the media collection will be used and in what context guides the content strategy.

Observing when and how viewers consume the content provides valuable data. NWLive needs qualitative data to know whether the current content strategy aligns with the Northwest lifestyle.

To help us generate content strategy proposals and in-turn validate those proposals, we look to representatives of NWLive’s target audience: Females in their late twenties to early thirties. While NWLive’s content does not currently reflect the interests of any one gender, focusing on the female gender as a target audience helps to bring a balanced gender perspective by avoiding the male archetype’s penchant for sports, beer, and bikinis. The target age group ensures the audience has the means to travel around the Northwest and participate in leisure activities.

Usually, one persona will suffice. However, the Northwest lifestyle is quite unique in that there are two hemispheres of experience given the cosmopolitan attitude of major Northwest cities and the natural environment that surrounds these urban centers. In response, we created two personas:

Intelligent 30-something

Natalie H represents the typical Northwest archetype: outdoorsy, environmentally conscious. Natalie’s primary motivation for exploring the Northwest-centric media collection is to raise her awareness of outdoor activities and community events with an environmental focus.
Hip 30-something

Kristen J is the life of the party with approximately 50% percent of Facebook’s 500 million users as her ‘friends’. Below that party-girl exterior lives a community activist who volunteers at the local youth shelter, providing mentorship to young girls from broken homes.

By focusing on these two primary personas, we have a good grasp of who consumes and shares the content. The next time Daniel chooses a Northwest event or topic to shoot, he can ask himself if Natalie or Kristen will take interest in that content.

Design Strategy

Let the content shine.

Video-based media holds our attention quite well when displayed on the television. The TV screen feeds our eyes and synapses. Television has an advantage: The rectangle is completely filled with images broadcasters and filmmakers want us to see. This experience changes in an interactive context. Not only are our eyes filled with a moving image, our visual field scans across text and controls. When combined, all of these elements call on us to make decisions about what to do and where to go next.

The design principles for NWLive have to support the viewer’s goals to discover the content they find relevant and quickly retrieve content they want to experience again. In order to get the message across to viewers, NWLive needs a user interface that showcases the content, vs. the work of a web graphic designer. And likewise, viewers need subtle visual cues like tags, descriptions, titles, and media controls in order to support and enhance their interactive experience.

Give the content producer the freedom to change and to iterate on their platform of choice.

Daniel has a brand direction for his media collection. He also has a logo that he commissioned from a talented graphic designer. He uses the logo to brand NWLive videos so that when they are viewed and shared across various channels, people know who produced the content. Daniel isn’t quite sure about how the brand will be expressed in an interactive realm and he’s not even ready to consider this aspect until he sees results about how people are using his collection. Daniel wants the scaffolding so he can figure out the finer details later.

Business Strategy

Hosting a website comes with a cost. While those costs continue to drop, Daniel has to be able to pay the expenses incurred through owning camera equipment, travel and fuel costs: the normal operating expenses.

Let them see ads.

Most viewers do not mind the presence of ads in their viewing space as long as the ads do not obstruct or obscure the content. Popups, flyouts, and other egregious methods used by advertisers to force their message into a viewers face typically put people off. People will usually appreciate a website that doesn’t bark at them like a rabid car salesman.

When ads integrate nicely into the user interface they do not obstruct content. Three advertising opportunities for NWLive to leverage:

Google ads
In-Player ads
Partner-based ads

In part 2, we will generate design solutions and work toward a sustainable technology strategy.

Marc McNeill: The tyranny of nice

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:10:42 +0000

My first English lesson with Mrs Sullivan aged nine. She was one of those teachers you remember. An awesome teacher.

“Nice” she told the class, “nice is a word you will not use”.

The word “nice” was forbidden in her classes. And woe betide anyone who described their weekend as nice, or their birthday present as nice (probably an Action Man or Scalextrix or if you were really lucky a Raleigh Chopper or Grifter).

It is a lesson I learned and kept close to my heart today: Nice is mediocre, saccharine, inoffensive, meaningless, ordinary, without passion, expression or meaning. “Nice” is a faceless word. “Nice” is something that the left brain aspires to and the right brain shuns. Nice is an anathema to the artist, to the designer. Nice doesn’t provoke, it doesn’t inspire. Nice is instantly forgettable.

“Have a nice day”.

Shit NO! (this deserves swearing – see the passion that Mrs Sullivan infected in me; what a teacher!) That’s “have an ordinary day”. It’s not a differentiated day. I don’t want to just have a nice day. I want to have an awesome day, a magical day, a memorable day!!

And the same with experiences and products.

Disneyland isn’t nice; it’s memorable and magical (despite the fact that you spend most of your day there queuing). Do you think that Steve Jobs would be happy if someone called the iPhone ‘nice’?

Nice is for Microsoft. It is for engineers to aspire to. Nice is not art, nice is not design, elegance, simplicity or beauty. Nice is dull mediocrity.

And yet nice is something that corporate software doesn’t even begins to strive for. There’s no place for nice in software methodology. Think Scrum; nice is rarely even a nice to have (it’s gold plating). Tell me Scrum Masters, in your zeal to deliver “business value”, ship the “minimal viable product”, I bet you’d be happy with what you deliver being considered nice. F@@k that. Your projects fester in a world of mediocrity, in a quagmire of backlog; picking off stuff to do, focussed on features and functions rather than customers goals and a desire to delight.

Bring it on Mrs Sullivan. Nice has no place in the English Language. Bring it on, Agile + Experience Design. Nice has no place in software development.

Can you banish nice from your lexicon; go beyond nice and seek delight?

I don’t want to have a nice day, I want to have a memorable day.

I don’t want to have a nice product, I want to have an awesome product.

I don’t want to have a nice experience. I want to have a memorable experience.

…And if I’ve designed an experience and the only word you can use to describe it is ‘nice’ then I consider myself a failure.

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-06 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Physicists Build A Memory That Stores Entanglement

Mark Needham: Ruby: Hash ordering

Tue, 07 Sep 2010 03:52:32 +0000

The application that I'm working on at the moment is deployed into production on JRuby but we also use the C Ruby 1.8.7 interpreter when developing locally since this allows us much quicker feedback.

As a result we sometimes come across interesting differences in the way that the two runtimes work.

One that we noticed yesterday is that if you create a hash, the order of the keys in the hash will be preserved when interpreted on JRuby but not with the C Ruby interpreter.

For example if we create the following hash in Ruby 1.8.7 it will be resorted into alphabetical order:

ruby-1.8.7 > a_hash = { :a => 1, :d => 2, :c => 3 }
 => {:a=>1, :c=>3, :d=>2}

Whereas in JRuby it will maintain its order:

jruby-1.5.1 > a_hash = { :a => 1, :d => 2, :c => 3 }
 => {:a=>1, :d=>2, :c=>3}

We found a post on the Ruby mailing list from a couple of years ago which pointed out that from Ruby 1.9 the order is in fact maintained.

However, Gregory Seidman also pointed out that…

Hashes are inherently unordered. Hashes provide amortized O(1) insertion and retrieval of elements by key, and that's it. If you need an ordered set of pairs, use an array of arrays. Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine.

Since that is indeed what we want we've created an array of arrays in our code instead. The code to retrieve values from the array of arrays is a bit more verbose but at least the order is now guaranteed!

Nishant Verma: Selecting Test Automation Tool

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:28:56 +0000

I was reading an interesting discussion on some Testing website (discussion thread) which was about commercial testing tool versus the open source counterparts.

Just to name a few and revising my own knowledge, some of the prominent software test automation tools are : QTP, LoadRunner, Rational Robot, Silk Performer, TestPartner etc. On the other hand the open source tools are: Selenium, Watir, Sahi, Cucumber,Frankenstein, SoapUI, Watin etc. No offense to the tools which I haven’t mentioned here. :)

So when we have such a huge list of test automation tools, the question is how do we decide the test automation tool? It’s a very good question and should be asked always before finalizing the Test Automation plan.

Depending on the project, a good test tool is the one which has:

Support project’s Technical Requirements
Multiple Environment Support
Programming language: Easy to learn and use
Allows Test Data Management
Easy and structured Reporting Features
Failure and Error Logging
Technical Support and available user community & acceptance
Re-Usability of components and libraries

I am sure there will be many more points to add to the above mentioned list but once there are a set of tools which passes the above mentioned checklist then the only deciding factor would be the “Investment on the Tool”.

Philip Calcado: Thoughts on Abstractions: Part 1 – Abstractions Everywhere

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:07:54 +0000

Update: Part II is here. Most complex tasks are solved using abstractions. To create an abstraction one groups lower-level concepts, what I will call primitives in this text, and make them interact in a pre-defined way. Abstractions are present at all levels in a system. Computers work based on electric signals. To reduce the Essential Complexity we [...]

Go to http://fragmental.tw for the full article

Philip Calcado: Thoughts on Abstractions: Part 2 – Abstractions in Your Domain

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 11:05:29 +0000

As we saw in Part I, abstractions are everywhere. Unfortunately, even though everyone is more than happy to reuse abstractions provided by someone else I often see people failing to identify those in their own code. Most people tend to create abstractions found using Russ Abbott’s method of using the textual description of a problem to [...]

Go to http://fragmental.tw for the full article

Nishant Verma: Identifying Memory Leakage

nishuverma@gmail.com (Nishant Verma) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:42:25 +0000

When I think of Performance Testing, the response time is not the only thing which comes to my mind. Performance Testing should not be done alone to capture the response time.

Based on the nature of application and it’s usage, minimally we should run two types of test. One to find out how many concurrent users the system will support for a given response time. I have really seen a decline in the need of performing these kinds of test. Application Performance is not always about the response time of web service. As a part of Performance Testing, one should also run Soak Test. Soak tests are long duration tests on the system with a static number of concurrent users that tests the overall robustness of the application. The intention of this test is to identify any performance degradation over time through memory leaks, increased GC or any other problem in the system.

To get the memory footprints of the application, we need to set up some specific counters in the server where the application is installed. Some of those counters are: Available Mbytes, Virtual Bytes, Private Bytes, # Bytes in all heaps, %Time in GC, Gen 1 Heap Size, Gen 2 Heap Size, Requests/sec. Once we run the test and get all the data, we need to plot the data in a graphic format so that we can find out the pattern and trend.

A typical memory usage graph would look like:

So if we see the graph above, there is little degradation of memory over the period of 3 hours of test. If there is any significant dip then we need to further break down the test and capture some more counters in order to find out why the memory is degrading.

Apart from this memory aspect, we also need to find out the windows resource aspect which would typically contain plotting of % Time in GC, Available MBytes, Request/Sec and some more counters depending on the specific needs.

To me Performance Testing is more to do with these graphical representation of Application data and System Usage rather than just capturing the Average Response Time. Moreover it’s easy to educate/convince anyone on the trend and plotting rather than just number.

Manish Chakravarty: Setting up a JRuby on Rails 3 + NetBeans dev environment

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:25:14 +0000

Aim: to get a dev environment up and running for what would be a mixed-mode Java/JRuby project using NetBeans as the IDE.

If NetBeans is your IDE of you choice then this blog post should help you out.

I have done these steps using a macbook pro / OSX Leopard with NetBeans 6.9 - steps should be pretty much the same on other platforms.

==========

Download JRuby from here and extract it in a directory of your choice ( I used /Users/manish/Desktop/jruby-1.5.2 for this example )

Fire up neatbeans

Go to Project - > New Ruby on Rails project.

We will now attempt to point NetBeans to the latest version of JRuby that we downloaded.

Click on the "Manage" button

In the Ruby Platform Manager, browse and point to the "jruby" binary in the "bin" folder :

We will now attempt to setup the ruby-debugger.

Download the jruby-debug-base gem from here and save it.

Install the gem locally.

Here's the command-line trace

% ./jruby -S gem install -l ~/Desktop/ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java.gem

Successfully installed ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java

1 gem installed

Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java...

Couldn't find file to include: 'VERSION'

Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-base-0.10.3.1-java...

Couldn't find file to include: 'VERSION'

Now pull in the ruby-debug-ide gem

Here's the command-line trace

% ./jruby -S gem install --ignore-dependencies -v 0.4.6 ruby-debug-ide

Successfully installed ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6

1 gem installed

Installing ri documentation for ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6...

Installing RDoc documentation for ruby-debug-ide-0.4.6...

Switching back to netbeans, give your project and name and choose the correct platform as shown below:

Configure the DB - I would strongly suggest using SQLite or MySQL unless your team has a good reason to use a different database. In the example I have used derby but I do not recommend it.

We now go to the installing rails page:

We have three action items - I have marked them with blue arrows

Click on the "Install Rails button" - you get the following dialog once it gets done:

After this I also installed Warbler and JRuby openssl.

Hit next and let netbeans complete the project creation.

Now that we have a JRuby on Rails 3 project created on the site, lets find out how to debug this application inside of netbeans.

Firing up the debugger ( Command-F5 ) - Netbeans tells me that it's downloading the glassfish debug gem - I am not sure why this is there - but I let it go ahead nonetheless.

Turns out I was wrong - I changed the server preferences to webrick.

Right click on the project name in the left pane , select "properties" and select Webrick server from the drop down as show below:

You would also need to comment out the entry referencing the sqlite-ruby gem in the Gemfile ( Line #8 ) as show below:

We now need the activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter ( we commented out sqlite in the previous step )

The command line trace on my system is as follows:

% ./jruby -S gem install activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter

Successfully installed jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054

Successfully installed activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java

2 gems installed

Installing ri documentation for jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054...

Installing ri documentation for activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java...

Installing RDoc documentation for jdbc-sqlite3-3.6.3.054...

Installing RDoc documentation for activerecord-jdbcsqlite3-adapter-0.9.7-java...

Hit F6 to run your app and voila!

==========

Further reading:

1. JRuby Debugging

2. JRuby and Rails 3 ( This information in this link is a bit outdated though )

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-05 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Radiohead live in Prague
Keychain Multi-tool Is Eight Handy, Pocketable Tools in One

Ooh, I so want one of these!
5 things Google still needs to fix in Android

Sumeet Moghe: In Defense of Powerpoint

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:06:13 +0000

In the past couple of years that I've had a Mac, a lot of people I've spoken to about presentation skills have remarked to me, "Oh, but you have Apple Keynote for presentations. It's so much better than Powerpoint." At the end of several of my presentations people ask me, "You didn't do that in Powerpoint, did you?". Whenever I do one of my talks on presentation skills I invariably have some people in my audience start off the discussion with a "Powerpoint sucks..." refrain. And the fact is that I've very loosely used the phrase "Death by Powerpoint..." in my conversations and talks. Today, I think it's high time that we give Powerpoint a proper defense. Let me say this -- there's nothing wrong with Powerpoint. It's probably the most versatile presentation tool on the planet and gives us a lot of power. The fact that we misuse it and give it a bad name has nothing to do with the quality of the tool itself. In fact, to rest my case I've gone ahead and created some awful slides using Apple Keynote and I assure you it took me little effort. I'm pretty sure I can do an awful Prezi and do similar stuff with Slide Rocket and Google Presentations. Convinced? I thought so!

Now to the skill of making good presentations. I think it's so simple, that anyone can do it. Nancy Duarte has made that point with an amazing presentation created solely in Powerpoint (above). In fact I'm going to use three presentations by our ThoughtWorks University students to make my point about things that you should absolutely do when you want to create effective presentations. And hopefully then, the tools will cease to matter.

Think Stories, not Facts

And I'm not talking about stories of the once-upon-a-time variety, though they may be cool too. I'm talking about why anything that you will say means anything to anyone. This is about how can you weave your message into an engaging timeline that captures attention, creates interest and evokes emotion. Last week, I shared with you SG Hill's hilarious Pecha-Kucha talk. Steve's talk had really simple tips on how to generate traffic for your blog. I could actually summarise the facts in a few lines:

Start a blog.
Get an analytics service to track your readership.
Try a snazzy blog title, and creative post headlines.
Have your friends comment liberally.
Mention your blog to your friends.
Provide an RSS feed.
Publicise it on social networks.

That's a really simple set of facts. In fact, they're so simple that they don't even need a presentation. I could put all of that into a single slide with bullet points or maybe even email it across. That however, isn't memorable enough and the way Steve wove these pieces of advice into a story of his own experience was funny, engaging and created a lasting impression. If I had to introduce someone to blogging, I'm now going to point them to Steve's video. The point I'm trying to make is that your presentation is more than just the facts that you want to convey. In fact I argue that presentation are more about entertainment and excitement than education. If you can as get people interested and excited about your topic; that's enough to get them to learn about the facts by themselves. In that, it's often more important as to what you don't say than what you do say in your presentation.

Ditch the Templates

Most Keynote and Powerpoint templates are really well intentioned. Both Apple and Microsoft however, are trying to satisfy the natural urge of most users and companies - the urge to bullet point. No wonder most templates tend towards a bullet-point layout for their slides. Now of course you don't want to be like the others, do you? I'm sure you want to be different. If you do, you're perhaps on the right track.

"Be interesting, or be invisible." - Andy Sernovitz

The fact is, that in most cases you don't need a template. You just need a blank slide that you overlay with full-bleed images. Last week Andrew Kiellor did a pretty amazing presentation, giving us a tour of what we should see in Australia. I've embedded the presentation for you to see (above) and you'll notice that Andrew has maintained visual harmony in the top right of his presentation by moving an arrow across Australia's map. In that, it fits with his presentation title; Australia - A Tour. By including real, dazzling images of landscapes across Australia, Andrew didn't just have people gasp in the middle of his presentation, he also negated the need for a template.

I'm not saying that you'll never need a template though. There are times when you want to create a strong, visual consistency across your presentation and a template is real handy for doing that. Garrey Reynolds' presentation on thinking like a designer is an example of one such situation. In such cases I recommend you create your own templates. And believe me, it isn't rocket science. If you can get smart at using master slides, Tom Kuhlmann can show you just how easy it is.

Meaningful Imagery Counts

A few weeks back I saw Sam Tardiff do a cool presentation with a provocative title - 17 Reasons why AFL's better than your favourite sport. Now Sam's presentation may not be the prettiest presentation on the planet, but he very effectively takes images from real life and puts them in front of the audience to let them see why AFL is a superior sport. I particularly like reason 14 - take a look! There's something about visual evidence that makes messages stick for our audience. It's important to note that where a single image was going to struggle making a point, Sam used a video. In a time when most presentation tools allow unbridled use of media, it's crucial that we exploit it. It's also crucial though, that we maintain relevance. It's easy to go overboard with irrelevant stock imagery and as Martin Fowler often says, "Stock photos are the bullet points of the 21st century." I can't help but agree when I see cheesy, overused stock imagery on slides when an earthy, real life image could have done a world of good. Garrey Reynolds of Presentation Zen fame has an excellent article on 10 ways you can use images poorly in presentations - an excellent list of mistakes to avoid. And if you needed some inspiration on how to create beautiful slides you can be proud of, do read my 7 tips to whip your slides into shape.

I strongly believe that bad presentations have to do more with the presenter than the tool. That said, you need a capable tool to help translate your actions into a show. Powerpoint 2010 (Windows only), is a worthy upgrade and there are several good reasons for you to add it to your presentation arsenal. Sure, there'll be a few tools here and there that have an extra feature or the other, but I guess nothing beats Powerpoint's all round capabilities. And if you needed help on how to effectively use the tool, you always have experts to reach out to for help. So the next time you feel like blaming the tool, please don't. Go back to the drawing board and just try harder!

Update:BTW, if you wanted to take your presentation skills to the next level, here's your opportunity to learn from the best. Hear live from eight presentation experts without leaving your home - ain't that amazing?

Michael Long: Prototype Two

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:22:55 +0000

Fig’s guiding design principles are still in play: let the content shine by keeping the user interface elements to a minimum; provide guidance and error feedback in a friendly and non-invasive manner.

This second prototype features:

Branding by way of a snazzy logo. The font face is Georgia (bold, italic) and the texture is actually an illustration of leaves.
Fast and simple account creation so anyone can start contributing
Pagination
And a couple of new phrases in Russian and Chinese

The next prototype will introduce some security and personalization by associating a phrase to the contributor that created it and hopefully the ability to attach and playback audio clips so people can learn pronunciations.

Play with the prototype »

Philip Calcado: ThoughtWorks Sydney Open Geek Night this Wednesday!

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 02:12:09 +0000

Giles says: A Talk on Seph ThoughtWorks‘ resident language inventor Ola Bini will be visiting Sydney in September. Ola is one of the four committers on the JRuby project (now the fastest Ruby runtime) and the inventor of the highly experimental prototype-based language Ioke. And we’ve convinced him to give a talk about his latest language project [...]

Go to http://fragmental.tw for the full article

Mark Needham: Flow in software teams

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:34:17 +0000

My former colleague Greg Gigon has written an interesting blog post where he talks about the pain that we cause ourselves by multi-tasking, a point which Kevin Fox also makes on the Theory of Constraints blog.

I think the overall point that he makes is very true:

We can switch our attention quickly from one task to another. But … is it good for our brain? Is it good for the work we are doing? Are we really more productive?

I've often found that when I try and switch between multiple different tasks I end up finishing none of them and it's certainly true that twitter, facebook and emails can be amazingly distracting.

Hopefully those types of distractions are less of an issue when working on a software development team, particularly if the team are pair programming.

Project influenced context switching

While I agree with Greg that it's good to try and make sure that we're only working on one task at a time, I think that to an extent there is always going to be some context switching involved if we have a group of people working together.

Greg touches on this briefly in his post:

When we are in a despair and need answers we are not worrying about anyone else. The goal is to ask or tell to achieve whatever we are after. We are not taking into consideration that we might be disturbing someone else Flow.

To me it seems that focusing on the flow of an individual individual/pair is a bit of a local optimisation when we're talking about software teams.

For example if a pair are working on a piece of functionality orthogonal to what another pair are working on then should they interrupt that pair if they need to talk about something?

Interrupting them possible would break their 'flow' but it might give one or both pairs an insight into the problem which they wouldn't have otherwise had.

From my experience pairs interrupting each other often helps reduce the amount of time that we spend building the wrong thing.

An alternative way to still gain this knowledge without interrupting people straight away would be to delay the conversation until a later time but perhaps the best moment for gaining that knowledge has now gone?

Counter productive context switching

The only time when interrupting a pair does seem counter productive is if you're doing so to ask a question whose answer could easily be found out with a quick bit of Googling.

In that case I completely agree with Greg that we should first think about the impact our interruption will have on our colleagues.

Overall

The topic of flow/context switching is an interesting one but I think we need to be careful about having it as our main goal on software delivery teams.

I wrote about pair flow a while ago where I described some ways to achieve more 'flow' within a pair but my current line of thinking is that we'll still have some interruption between pairs and that's not necessarily a bad thing.

An approach to ponder…

Mike Wagg once suggested that pairs should work in 25 minute pomodoros and only be interruptible when they're on a break from one.

This seems like an interesting idea but communication would end up being much more structured/time boxed/weird?!

Mark Needham: Design Simplicity: Partially updating an object

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:32:00 +0000

One of the most common discussions that I have with my colleagues is around designing bits of code in the simplest way possible.

I've never quite been able to put my finger on exactly what makes a design simple and there is frequently disagreement about what is even considered simple.

On the last project I worked on we had an interesting problem where we wanted to partially update different parts of an object from different pages of the application.

We had access to the id of the object from the URL so my initial thought was that when we submitted each page we could load the full object from the database and update it with the values that had just been submitted from that page.

The problem with that solution was that it meant we needed to make another database call without any real benefit from doing so.

We had already created objects representing the data submitted from these pages so Christian suggested that an alternative approach would be to create NHibernate mappings for those objects instead so that we could just map the updated values straight to the database.

We had bit of duplication in our objects as we had one object representing every bit of data the user had provided so far and then two smaller objects just representing the data provided for each of the pages.

public class TheObject
{
	public string Page1Property { get; set; }
	public string Page2Property { get; set; }
}

public class PartialObject1
{
	public string Page1Property { get; set; }
}

public class PartialObject2
{
	public string Page2Property { get; set; }
}

We then created NHibernate mappings for each of those objects:

public class TheObjectMapping : ClassMap<TheObject>
{
	Map(x => x.Page1Property);
	Map(x => x.Page2Property);
}

public class PartialObject1Mapping : ClassMap<PartialObject1>
{
	Map(x => x.Page1Property);

public class PartialObject2Mapping : ClassMap<PartialObject2>
{
	Map(x => x.Page2Property);

When loading the object from the database onto the page we used 'TheObject' and its associated mappings and when updating the object from the individual pages we could use the partial object mappings.

I think this was quite a neat approach as it allowed us to reduce the complexity of our controller code when updating an object as well as removing the need for one trip to the database.

The trade off was that we ended up writing more mapping code but that seemed to be a reasonable trade off to make.

Jonathan McCracken: ASP.NET MVC in 4 minutes!

jonathan.mccracken@gmail.com (Jonathan McCracken) — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 15:13:57 +0000

I just published a short 4 minute video on how to build an ASP.NET MVC project. It walks you though the absolute basics of MVC. You can take a look below or visit YouTube here.

Thomas Czarniecki: StringTemplate views for Spring

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:27:02 +0000

StringTemplate is a great templating engine. It’s powerful, simple and quite opinionated. I’ve come really appreciate its simple purpose: render data. No assignment, no arbitrary method invocation. It is not Turing-complete and it would make a lousy rules engine.

SiteMesh is a web-page layout and decoration framework that is my current “golden hammer” when I need to provide a consistent layout across a java web-application. It seems to fit with the way that I think about web pages a whole lot more than something like Tiles – I really prefer decoration over composition as a means of layout control.

I’ve used StringTemplate it in the past on java projects and for a while have wanted to create a way to integrate it with Spring Framework’s MVC so I can stop using Freemarker and Velocity in Spring-heavy projects. Not that Freemarker is that bad, it’s just that I really don’t need or want all of the bells and whistles that come with it and allow it to be so frequently misused. All I really want is a templating engine that renders the model and does not get in my way. It just so happens that SiteMesh also makes an appearance on these projects and I’ve been wanting to use StringTemplate to provide layout decorators as well as Spring views.

Today I’ve released version 1.0 of my spring-stringtemplate integration library as a GitHub project. It provides an implementation of a Spring MVC View and ViewResolver for StringTemplate, and a decorator servlet for SiteMesh.

Feedback is always welcome.

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-04 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 05 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Jason Yip: Andrew Walker's Kanban journey

noreply@blogger.com (Jason Yip) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 09:05:14 +0000

Andrew Walker just told me that he started a blog about his team trying Kanban, partly inspired by the talk I gave at Agile Sydney.

Check out Kanban Chronicle: Insights Into Our Kanban Journey.

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-03 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 04 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Use Technician's Codes to Diagnose Your Android Phone
Android Developers: Brace for the Future
Cricket to remain dull despite betting scandal, insists ICC
William Hague is definitely not one of ours, insist furious gay community
GitHub

"Gitolite allows you to host Git repositories easily and securely."

Sumeet Moghe: Dev Camp Bangalore 3 is today - Hope to see you there

noreply@blogger.com (Sumeet Moghe) — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 02:16:55 +0000

DevCamp Bangalore 3 is happening at ThoughtWorks's Diamond District office at Bangalore today.

Registration

Like any BarCamp, registration is on the wiki and there is no registration fee.

DevCamp is an un-conference by the hackers, for the hackers and of the hackers. It's a species of BarCamp where anything a lover of computers and technology would consider important or entertaining goes. The first DevCamp took place a little over two years ago, and we've always had a lot of fun being a part of this event; we're hoping to keep that trend going with DCB3.

What's in store?

DCB3 is going to be packed with informative presentations, Fishbowl sessions, lightning talks, and much more, so don't miss it!

Interested in doing a session?

Please keep in mind the fact that everyone at DevCamp is a hacker, a pro. Assume a high level of exposure and knowledge on the part of your audience, and tailor your sessions accordingly. Avoid 'Hello World' and how-to sessions which can be easily found on the net. First hand war stories, in-depth analyses of topics, and live demos are best.

Add your abstract/presentation topic here. Don't forget to sign up, and do pass the message along to anyone you think would be interested. Hope to see you there!

Jie Xiong: 贪婪与恐惧

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:21:41 +0000

有个小姑娘对我说：“我们真的很想用TDD的方式来开发，可是我们的基础太差了，我们真的能做到那样吗？”

人性的两大弱点：贪婪，和恐惧。亲眼看到了美好的可能性，于是迫不及待想要得到它，是为贪婪。一旦理想与现实抵牾，马上开始担心是否天堂遥不可及，在忧心忡忡中停止了前进，是为恐惧。

不要贪婪。静下心来把远景细化成一个个可以实施的细小改进，把一件件小事落实做好。不要恐惧。不要停下自我改善与帮助别人的步伐，在看不到山顶的时候也不要踯躅不前。每天向上走一点，也许到不了天堂，一定会比现在好很多。

（与WJ共勉）

Martin Fowler: Rehabbing my website

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:55:00 +0000

I started martinfowler.com back in 2000, now its grown to around 3.5 million words in 500 pages, getting about 200,000 page views a month. One problem with the site is that it looks retro even for 2000 and seriously needs some cosmetic surgery. Another is that it’s not easy to browse to find useful articles.

So now the dsl book (which weighs in at 1.2 million words) is pretty much done with, I need to give martinfowler.com some love in these (and some other) departments. So I’m currently working on a nicer look for the website. I’ve also decided to write a series of “guide pages” - these are pages devoted to a single topic (such as agile software development) that highlight which pages on my website are likely to be useful on that topic.

I have these mocked up now to a point where I’m reasonably happy with them. Now the task is to apply these changes to the current website. My task is eased to some degree by the fact that all the HTML pages are generated from XML sources, but even so it will take some time to ensure everything looks reasonable. I also have a lot of travels coming up in the next few months, so I’m not predicting any delivery dates.

Kailuo Wang: Short update about Photography Assistant Beta

noreply@blogger.com (Kailuo Wang) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:05:00 +0000

So far the feedbacks I got from users are pretty good. No major defects found. I did some testing myself, and I love the DoF calculator! (with manual exposure setting :)

It's going to be a hectic month Sept for me. I wouldn't expect new features any time soon ( I might release 1.5 with some minor fixes ). But the I already decided what to add the next release - Photography Log, which will allow you to record all exposure setting (iso, shutter speed, aperture, subject distance, GPS location and even an optional cell phone camera pic of the motif) in your log. I would hope that this will be helpful mostly for film photography beginners. The GPS location might be helpful for most digital photographers too.

Daniel Wildt: DanielWildt

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:19:26 +0000

Sometimes I see people saying that they don’t need to do anything to improve the world they live in, since they do their part, paying taxes. Some believe that government needs to take action.

I have another opinion about it, and as far as I know, lots of people have another opinion too.

In summary: What we have in place, it’s not enough. Waiting on government, will not help at all. We need action. We need to help people to take action. Let’s do it ourselves.

The thing is: people develop ways to do good to their communities, and therefore to their cities, countries and bingo, world!

But how? Is there a ticket to buy somewhere?

Do we need something huge like a “live aid“?

No.

Do we need a disaster to happen, to start looking for these things?

No.

Do I need to wait for World Social Forum to come to my country?

No…

So, give one example of movement to help and/or follow!

Looking at software development world, we have opensource software, a movement that creates an environment for knowledge sharing. An environment that helps people all around the world to build better software, and have access to computer software with less costs.

With these things, other people can do good to their communities. That’s good.

That’s a way to help changing someone else’s world.

But, let’s take a look at “a thing” that is universal… music!

I’m gonna use as an example, Playing for Change.

Here’s a message: no matter who you are, no matter where you go in your life, at some point, you gonna need somebody to stand by you. Check this:

That turned out to become a movement all around the world, called playing for change.

But, how that’s relate to software world?

They did something and later on they realize that it was big and could become a movement to help people to help people. Musicians could make this happen.

So… we need to understand how to make a movement?

Maybe… check this TED.com talk about how to start a movement.

So this is all about following someone and help the movement to grow. Some movement you believe and want to help.

Here I go then. Follow me.

Well, every time I do an event related to technology, where I get a lot of people together, I do some action for those who need help, with donation of food or clothing.

It’s like a “presenting for change“, where you have people doing what they love to do, presenting technology, running coding dojos, but with a social action together with it. It is a simple way to continue being who you are, and doing what you do, but getting different results from your actions.

If you are working close to a technology users group (take Java or Ruby or Agile for instance), you can do that.

If you are doing an event, you can add some kind of donation to an entity that needs help in your event schedule.

So, all my events will have an entry pass, a donation?

Well, if it is a donation, you can’t make it mandatory. But, you can ask people to bring donations! They have a choice. Give them a choice. They will bring donations, if they want to!

So, bottom line is?

Look around and you will see that a lot of people need help. Check for nongovernmental organizations that need help. You will not be able to help them all. Help some of them, check for local needs, ask for help to understand and find organizations that need more help. And help them. With the help of your community. You will find people willing to help. Go for it.

Let’s Help It!

This post was first wrote in May 17th of 2010. It was on my draft since today. Since then I was searching for a way to help this new movement to happen. And here we go again. Let’s Help It! It is an open source software deployed in a free cloud environment, where you can add organizations near you. Therefore other people looking for organizations where they live, can look at that.

It took less than a month to build the first release of the software (from Aug 8th to Aug 31st), following Engineering practices from Agile Software Development Methodologies, with free time from a team of great developers, people I respect a lot. Thanks a lot to all people who made it happen and will continue. And if you want to make it happen too, help us to improve the software! Get in touch and play with us!

Tagged: cloud, community, do it yourself, donation, motivation, open source, teamwork

Simon Brunning: Links for 2010-09-02 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Battle of the Android Home Screen Launchers

Sam Newman: links for 2010-09-02

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:01:38 +0000

Patric Fornasier: Agile Talk in Bern

noreply@blogger.com (Patric Fornasier) — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 20:27:41 +0000

Next Monday (September 6th), I'm giving a talk in Bern. I'll be talking about how our software delivery teams around the globe work and get stuff done.

The talk will start at 6pm at Restaurant Schmiedstube. More info and registration via Guild42.

Come along if you're in the area!

Zubair Khan: Agile session Alt.Net London

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:01:45 +0000

So to start the conference I chose to take part in a session about agile development and processes. I think mainly because I wanted a refresher on some of the points and to see if I could contribute. It’s nice to see plenty of people there new to Agile as I was at my first [...]

Zubair Khan: altdotnet London September 2008

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:01:45 +0000

So, I’ve just got back from the altdotnet conference in London. This is my second altdotnet conference, and it was as good as I remember. You could see people had moved on, and it was nice to see that altdotnet has had its affect on uSwitch.com in a positive way. 5 attendees were currently employed [...]

Zubair Khan: Lost dev seeks direction

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 19:01:45 +0000

My first blog post on this wordpress site. How exciting, I’m trying to get other the initial, “I’m not worthy of publishing my thoughts” thing that I’m sure all those that blog need to get over, so please bear with me. I’ve also got to keep my sentences shorter! Hopefully, I’ll be able to use [...]

Zubair Khan: MEF and the Personal Spike