I dropped into Liz Keogh's discussion Introduction to Behaviour Driven Development last night. It was an engaging talk, and I managed to scrawl down a page full of notes, which probably shows more about my incoherent thought process than BDD (click to embiggen): There was much more to the discussion, and I suggest you go … Continue reading Introduction to BDD →

Here's a summary of a series of emails and phone conversations I had with my old dedicated hosting provider. You should get a sense of why I don't do business with them any more. Worst Hosting Company (WHC): we are going to move your dedicated host to a new location in 1 months' time, and … Continue reading Worst Hosting Company Award… →

I found the XTC meetup to be a fascinating event. There were a few familiar faces I remembered from previous years, and quite a few new ones. There was a palpable buzz in the room, which got quite crowded as more people turned up. I had a long chat with a guy who develops the … Continue reading JNarrate, JBehave and Pixies →

It's actually been a couple of years since I last went to the eXtreme Tuesday Club, but I think it's time to poke my nose into the meeting tonight. It's been 10 years since the very first meeting.

This came out last week, but I didn't have time to comment on it. Anthonio Cangiano did some benchmarking tests of various flavours of Ruby. In this benchmarking run, he was comparing the speed of Ruby based upon the compiler used to build Ruby. Previously, Ruby had been compiled using Visual C++ 6.0 (a 10 … Continue reading Benchmarking Ruby →

The Java Posse recently posted a podcast titled "Effective Communication" (it was a recording of a session of their "RoundUp" un-conference). I found it a fascinating discussion, all the more because it echoed many of the problems I'm experiencing right now. Primarily, how do you get a group of developers to work effectively together? Communication … Continue reading Communication Trumps Checklists →