Blog @ Codonomics

Agile By Example 2012 - The travel to Warsaw, Poland is a long journey. And to stay there for a few days beating their chill weather for a skinny guy like me, its a gargantuan task. My diet there during the duration of my stay there was Bread, Butter and Jam with a cuppa coffee for Breakfast. And just Apples and juices for lunch and dinner :( I saved much of my energy not talking to folks until I'm done with my talk. Once my talk is delivered, I had a great time with the attendees and other speakers. My slide-deck of the presentation that I gave at this conference is below: Why I hated the daily stand-up and how I started enjoying it? If you've attended my talk at the conference, I'd appreciate you feedback of my talk via speaker-rate link, just below the embedded presentation. Thanks in advance! My talk feedback can be found at speaker-rate, comments section of slide-share, etc. Below is the snapshot of some live feedback of my talk on twitter: RT

Are you wanting to learn and/or better your Vim-ability? Below are some good reads that you can't miss to master Vim. Learn Vim Script the hard way Vim as your IDE Coming home to Vim Vim Adventures Tim Pope, The father to many a vim plugins Effortless Ctags with Git https://gist.github.com/3783277 Vim, you complete me more to come....keep visiting ;) Hearty thanks to URUG-ers for pointing these cool resources.

Having recently had the opportunity to work on and refactor some of the UI automation projects, I have come across many a gotchas that creep into the automation codebase resulting in not so beautiful, a little un-manageable, random-failure throwing specs. The worst of all things to expect from an automation test suite are random  failures, because it defeats the purpose of Continuous Integration in that the team stops responding to the automation test failures saying that there always is some random test that fails. So, if there is a test that fails randomly, analyse the reason for it and fix it ASAP giving due consideration to the solution that you put in place to ensure that the spec would not fail again for wrong reasons.    To aid the folks writing ui automation specs, I list the common gotchas that you should be aware of so that you do not end up making the same mistakes. And here goes the list: 1. Loving to sleep      Liberal presence of sleep() method in the automati

     Are you spending time in unfruitful, never-ending, repeated meetings to discuss the solution - the single silver bullet - that meets all of customer requirements? And do you care to get the shit out of that quagmire? The first thing to realize is that you are not on the road to MVP. Secondly, you should seek to hit the road to MVP. Lastly, read further and digest the lesson :)      Imagine God from nowhere appears in front of you and asks, "My dear, what do you want?" Would you ask for ask for just an item or an endless list of items? Without exception, each one of you would ask for the latter. The situation is no different even in the business context of the software projects that we undertake. Thanks to the excellent efforts and works of the Sales or frontline folks. The customer looks at you as an all powerful Angels if not as God. Their business wants are limitless and they expect you to solve it magically in one go.      You and your team are now in deep shit. Y

Agile Tour 2012 would be my first Agile conference that I'll be speaking this year, very closely followed by Agile By Example 2012 conference in Poland. Because the timing of the said conferences are very close, I shall be speaking on the same topic and it is "How I hated the ceremonial standup and how I ended up enjoying it." If you are around to any of these conferences, feel free to get in touch; we'll talk and share our experience. Thank you ISEC for accepting my proposal!

I'm glad to announce that... Should you wish to know what I'd be talking about, and what other speakers have to share, do browse Speakers List . See you there...

Use Case: Assume a User model, having an association with UserProfile model. Also, presume that Admin, Artist, Exhibition Curator, Collector, etc are models that are inherited from UserProfile. Now, if we'd like to know weather a given user is an admin or a collector or of any other profile type, we'll typically have to define methods like below in the User class: We coule simplify the above methods using meta-programming technique to define methods at runtime, using "define_method" method. However, there exists an easier and neater method. It is to employ the delegate and StringInquirer as below: With any of the above implementations, we can test a given user instanse against a specific user profile type as below: user.admin? instead of user.user_profile.type.titleize == "Admin" As a matter of fact, starting Rails 2.3.x, if I'm right, you test for Rails environment with a code like the one below: Rails.env.development? inst