Today I spent the whole day debugging an elusive concurrency problem in ruby on rails running on JRuby. We start some threads during the web request and, usually sooner than later, all our database connections are blocked. Getting deep into the details of multithreading, connection pooling and the like is nothing I enjoy doing. Especially … Continue reading Pair Programming: Staying within “the zone”
Month: September 2009
Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
Instead of motivating our teams, we should simply stop de-motivating them. Everyone you work with is highly motivated by default. But, bad information policies, countermanding orders or simply ignoring ideas will turn a highly motivated team member into a disgruntled road block. Open Communication Highly skilled team members are able to deal with the truth. … Continue reading Open Communication Stops De-Motivating your Team
Deploying with Capistrano
At the end of April, I wrote about how automatic rsyncs were making my operations life a living hell. Enter Summer, vacation, new developer and here we are mid-September before I finally get around to permanently fixing this problem. But, I can't really blame all of it on life - after Matthias gave me a … Continue reading Deploying with Capistrano
“Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
It's a very important thing for any agile team to find a definition of Done, which fits the expectations and the environment of the current development. For User Stories, I definitely prefer Done = Released as the most helpful metric. Only if a story is really out there serving users can you truly forget about … Continue reading “Done” is the Wrong Measure of Success
Migrating to Google Custom Search
"Do what you do best, and link to the rest." - Jeff Jarvis Our search has been suffering for the past year. Decreased usage and miserable performance had combined to make it a wasteland of vain suppositions which alienated our users. Enter Google Custom Search. The Users Have Spoken (and we're listening) We were averaging … Continue reading Migrating to Google Custom Search
A Kanban Board for Features
We're using PivotalTracker as our agile planning tool. It's great for maintaining a backlog of prioritized user stories and managing the flow of stories within an iteration. We're really happy with it. But recently a new requirement came up: How can we manage our bigger features? How can we make sure all the stories we … Continue reading A Kanban Board for Features
