Javascript: One Language to rule them all, and in the darkness... NO WAIT!

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been wondering if learning a new language was worth it. What I'm realizing is that the tech stack for BuildItHub has to be a low cost of entry. The main reason is collaboration. I need to let any developer using any operating system, to easily get involved. That means .net is simply out of the picture. Yes, I know that visual studio express exists. And NO! I will not be pushing that gateway drug.

I wish with all my heart that the schism between .net and languages such as Ruby, Python and others didn't exist. They do exist, and we have to acknowledge that. The barriers are breaking down in our communities though. I have a lot of friends from both camps and they are starting to talk more. We are attending a lot of the same events and those events are including tech from all domains.

It has probably been said before, but no matter what camp you're in, javascript is something we all use if we do any kind of front end or RESTful API development. So this is where we will start. What I've decided is that in order to keep BuildItHub as open as possible we are going to use mainly a JavaScript stack. That could mean plain JavaScript, lots of libraries, probably knockout, sails.js or express js for the web framework, and node js behind the scenes. Perhaps CoffeeScript as well, if Brian doesn't veto it. This is going to be a lot of learning for me (and for those joining the project), but I'm excited about it and its software anyone can download and start using on almost any os.

Could JavaScript be the language to bring our two camps under one tent in other projects as well. I am not a prophet, nor the son of a prophet but I think in many ways it already has, and I predict it will even more so in the years to come.

What's a Kingmaker Without Coin?

First off, Happy Easter to you if you celebrate the holiday. If not, happy Sunday to you...

Sometime last week I found the book written by Steve O'Grady called The New Kingmakers: How Developers Conquered the World. It is a new book by RedMonk co-founder Stephen O'Grady chronicling the rise of the developer as the decisive force in the technology industry and sectors beyond. COINcidentally, last week's news included a lot of stories about BitCoin, the decentralized, non-controlled currency. A lot of those stories were driven because of the stuff happening with Cyprus and the EU central banks. I first heard it talked about on the radio then saw articles popping up all over the Interwebs.

Silver and gold as well as other precious metals have long been seen as the truly stable, non-inflationary currency by many. I am not a serious student of Austrian economics, but I'm a fan of Ron Paul and have long wished we would get away from the Keynesian thought about currency and central banking. A lot of people "in my tribe" say gold and silver are the way to go. I agree with them, but why do we say that? For me it comes down to my lack of trust in the central bankers who pump 85 billion of new money into our economy out of thin air each month, thus destroying the value in our savings and salaries that seldom keep up with this inflation. But will gold and silver really stop them from doing that? It didn't stop Rome, who debased their own coins by diluting the purity as new coins were smelted/printed ;)

What would happen if a currency was totally decentralized and no government controlled it's creation? Is this the reality with the P2P BitCoin. Nothing stops a government or a private citizen from putting together a huge number of servers and Mining for coins. I don't totally understand this process, but it intrigues me to think about where we might end up in the future, and all driven from some pretty cool development.

Note: If you wish to discuss this post let's converse on Branch.

Startups Are the New Nineties Garage Bands

It's not my title but I thought of it before finding this old article. Startups are popping up everywhere. So many people are involved with finding the next big thing. You have incubators all over the place hoping to be a part of the next thing and people wanting to make it big with their idea.

In the 90s everyone had a band or knew of someone in a band. You would have to find talented peeps to fill the different roles and then collaborate to get anything rolling. A few took off and we all know their names now.

Today, you can take your idea to something like Start Garden or an incubator and find peeps to be on your team. What I want to do with BuildItHub is allow anyone with some talent and some social grace to join the band. It might be for one song, a couple gigs or for the long haul, but that is what I want to allow. Just have to find out if others want to play along...

Learning Ruby on Rails: Is it worth it?

Note: The following post might be me having my own geeky midlife crisis. After all, I am turning 38 this year. So maybe all the young hipsters out there are making me a bit envious. But, maybe it's not a crisis, and maybe the grass is really greener on the other side...

I've been toying around with the idea of learning another programming language. Being interested has not driven me to commit to another language on an actual project though. I think for me it comes down to doing what I know because it's fast, or at least faster than starting from scratch with all the new syntax and tools. Being a hopeful, evening and weekend entrepreneur, usually I'm trying to put a minimum viable product together as fast as I can. Necessity seems to be my driving force.

I've been a .net developer since 2001. When it first came out, or shortly after I had to choose if I'd be a .net or Java Dev. After the decision was made I never really desired to be anything else. I'm not one of those developers who thinks Bill Gates is the anti-Christ, though Balmer doesn't give me the warm fuzzies. I have not jumped on the M$ hate bandwagon, and actually have come to really love Windows 7 (Windows 8 will not be my next OS though). I've never been much of a fan of the console. In fact I'm quite fond of IDEs. Well, I'm fond of Visual Studio, as it's been my main tool of choice for over a decade.

Rails interests me because it seems to have quite a community of really excited craftsman around it. They seem to care about doing things right. By right I mean, as the website says, optimized for developer happiness and sustainable productivity. Supposedly you can build a highly maintainable site very quick [if you know what you're doing].

These new thoughts started a little over a year ago. I'd started doing a lot more front end development and have come to almost enjoy JavaScript. Once I started treating it like a real language, I realized the power that is there. Now something is happening within and I don't believe I'm the only .net develops out there feeling this way. I want to learn something new but a few things stand in my way from pulling the trigger. One - I'm learning to tolerate the console, but I have to admit I'm still not a fan. I know many will not take me seriously after that statement, but i have to be honest. Two - Ruby, Rails and lots of the tools are built around the Unix console being the main tool of choice so it seems the Mac is becoming the new developer machine. Macs are freaking expensive and my current employer isn't going to foot the bill at this time. I could try Ubuntu on my windows machine, but getting it all setup, configured and taking the time to learn the new OS could take me a while. That same while I could be finishing my next MVP in a language I'm pretty good with.

Is it worth the hassle? Am I just being lazy or am I being practical? One thing I am considering seriously is Node.js and Sails.js - Something about an all js and HTML stack really has me intrigued, but how hard will it be with a windows machine? Your thoughts and advice is welcome...

Why I love my job this year ;)

I want to start off by saying it's nice to have managers who are willing to try new things as long as they see the potential benefits.

Beginning this year we decided we would be very serial about our projects rather than try to multi-task on a bunch of different ones. This was because of this post ( http://spin.atomicobject.com/2012/10/24/getting-reschooled-in-project-management-how-to-plan-a-project-with-no-multi-tasking/ ) Basically we swarm a project and work on it until it's done.

Because of this serial dev process we are doing a ton of paired programming. In fact we are doing quite a bit of tri-programming (not sure what to really call it). The results have been amazing! Everyone is learning the code bases of all the projects. We are delivering in shorter amounts of time so departments can start experiencing ROI on their project. Our code is just better. It is easier to maintain, easier to grasp, and we are building our own set of standards and templates as we determine what matches our way of doing things.

The one downside for the business is they need to learn to wait in line. This is where our awesome management comes to the rescue. They actually say, "You will have to wait." Our business is very cool about this and I think it's because they see the things we have released and are totally digging those projects. Waiting in line is worth it if you're going to be getting a freaking cool set of tools that will make your job easier.

If anyone has any questions on how we did this I'd be happy to share.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time too many great and wonderful technological inventions were lost to us. Every day, great thinkers, who didn't particularly consider themselves to be great thinkers, had many sparks of imagination come to them. Most of those sparks were passing; a few ignited into small flames. Some took on a life of their own and consumed the thinkers, who quickly started building their ideas into what they hoped would one day become reality. Sadly, for all of us, most of the ideas lacked something. For a few of them it was specific knowledge, for others it was money, but for a lot of them, it was simply a continued lack of feedback and support from others when the times got tough. One day a small group of thinkers and builders got together in one place and swore to themselves and to all the truly great thinkers and builders out there, that this would not continue to be the case. Because of that, they built a place where individuals could come with their ideas, talents and other resources, and build teams around the best of those ideas. Because of that, good ideas got better and those ideas became profitable endeavors for the members of those teams. Until finally we all benefited from the inventions that would have otherwise been lost as so many were before.

www.buildithub.com

Into the Realm of Elves (.net >> rails)

Introduction to My Journey

I'm biting the bullet and learning Rails today. I would be at GRDevDay but didn't get the ticket before they were sold out. So while you are all learning some cool stuff I will do the same. The latest version of the book "Agile Web Dev w/ Rails" just showed up on my kindle and I'm going to take a shot. Yesterday I tweeted...

Chadrick Mahaffey @chadrickm I feel like I'm a human venturing into a dark forest trying to follow elves (.net to #rails).

And if elves were real and we lived in some fantasy realm, Rails might seem to me like a strange magic (were talking high fantasy here) to us humans (.net developer using a windows machine). I'm some kind of explorer who knows there is amazing things to discover, but I'm a bit afraid of the journey. I did just watch Avatar with the family and perhaps that analogy would work as well. We will stick with fantasy for now. It will hopefully keep me entertained enough to continue writing the journey out.

I am developing alone today simply because I have not sought out a pair to enter this realm with yet. Perhaps I will find a native at some point who can take me deeper into the forest.

What version do I have?

I know I've installed Rails before. I had to at CodeMash for a pre-compiler event I went to. Let's see what I have.

$ gem list --local rails

So I have 3.2.9 and it appears I might not be able to get 4.0.0.beta1 using windows. So until I invest in a new maGIc book I'll be a bit behind the time, but this is fine for now.

Learning to Use Hand Incantations Again (cmd and SublimeText2)

Yeah, the elves are pretty hard core users of only hand incantations and the forest itself, where we outsiders have become dependent on our wands and scrying pools to do pretty much everything. It's not bad and I've been doing it more and more since using git rather than hg of late.

I love this Tome's advise for us humans when it comes to the IDE. "here's the point in the book where we recommend you sit down..." NO IDE?!? I knew that already. Not a huge surprise here but it is a big reason I have not gotten to this sooner.

I'm in the forest now. Time to summon something.

With a couple simple incantations I have summoned my first app and attempt to contact the natives.

OK - I'm on my way now ;)

Silo is a four letter word...

So +Dan Tape  posted an article about a man from Verizon who outsources his development job to China and watches videos all day. My question is, what kind of corporate environment allows this to go unnoticed by coworkers? Major SILO development going on over at Verizon I guess... 

This looks like something right up my alley. Maybe we will see you there.

Kalamazoo X Conf

A New Metaphore - Epic Story to TV Series

I’m currently reading a book by Ka Wai Cheung called “The Developer’s Code: What Real Programmers Do”. In the chapter called “Metaphor” Cheung writes “...when I’m asked what I do, I often resort to analogy. Our industry is chock-full of them. It’s the way we describe our work to everyone else... metaphor has to become our meta-language. Not only is it how we connect the uniqueness of programming to the general public, but it’s often how we make decisions on how we approach our own software problems.” He goes on to explain how we borrow from traditional building when we speak of building software. We have roles such as engineers, architects, project managers and designers. We have borrowed our very identities from another industry. Some of that made a lot of sense when software releases were done over floppy disk or CD, but not today with the web the way it is. I wont quote the entire chapter, but he ends with the idea that, “Software development might be closer to writing a novel or composing music.” I love the writer analogy and I’ll probably overuse it so much in the future that it will become more harmful than helpful, but let’s have some fun with it.

There is a series of fictional books out by one of my favorite authors. Perhaps you have heard of George R. R. Martin, or perhaps you have heard of the HBO series that is based on his books called, “A Game of Thrones”. It has a very mature rating so be warned if you check it out. My new analogy for software developers and software projects in general is that of the epic book series turned TV series. Writers (Developers) take the original book (Business Processes) with the help of the director (Architects or Leads) and the original author (The Business), and they break it up into seasons and episodes. For now I like to think of the season as the current technologies a project will take advantage of. Each episode is a release with it’s minimum marketable features and these can and should happen much more often than we have allowed them to in the past. As Cheung says, we are on the web and people are now embracing iterative change much more than they use to. In all episodes there are lots of subplots or stories that make up the whole episode. Agile has already defined features as stories, so I’ll just stick with that for now.

Before I read this book and before this analogy, I started calling our sessions by season and episode (S3E2). It was just my funny way of keeping things interesting but now I’m going to rethink the significance of it. I think this is a way better description of our industry today than the bridge or skyscraper analogies of days gone by and as Brian and I co-author Luncht I’ll be thinking about it more and more.

Luncht S3E4 - Test Driven DESIGN - Chadrick's Take

There is substantial overhead when doing TDD, but the code is better for it and the knowledge transfer is automatic.

Doing things right takes time and a lot of effort.

What I found was my story bullets, what I call Acceptance Tests, were not completely thought out. It's hard to anticipate what you will be testing until you really spend some time focusing on the feature, which includes how the user will use the system, which in turn means views. Because we were unsure of the acceptance tests we started with wire-framing the two views (ForgotPassword & ResetPassword). Then psudo-coded our implementation in the form of comments so we generally know which services would need to be created. Then at the back-end it was a return to TDD to build our services. Eventually this brought us back up front where we tested our controller actions with mocks of these new service(s). It went pretty well I think, but led me to wonder about a few things.

First, most TDD tutorials only test business rules at the domain level (back end). When in reality we are developing our solution in an all inclusive way. Our features, to be complete need a front to back, or back to front (however you decide) implementation. I'm not saying I want to write a bunch of implementation tests, but we have to be looking at a workflow that covers all these pieces and interaction between these pieces, and I don't think we are there yet.

In the real world, is it possible for the business to write valid acceptance tests that we could convert directly to test methods? How does this work where your features are coming from the business who on one extreme wants to design and architect the entire solution, or on the other extreme doesn't have a clue what he/she wants. I think what we realized is that we developers will almost always end up massaging the acceptance tests while we determine more exact requirements.

My Second Set of Eyes When I'm Not Pairing

Tests become even more important to me when I'm coding alone. They allow me to focus on the here and now of my code while not having to spend a ton of time thinking about what I will probably break by making a change. They are in essence, my second set of eyes. Just yesterday I changed the very foundation of my current project because I found out I was doing it a bit wrong. (Side note: If I'd been programming as a pair we probably would have found this much sooner.) Rather than hack a fix because I was so far along, which I've done plenty of times in the past, I rewrote the foundation of my code-base. I only attempted this because I had the confidence that my test coverage would help me get back to where I needed to be in a short amount of time.

This quote from Michael Valenty is one of my favorites, "It’s like rediscovering that diet and exercise is the key to losing weight, except that I rediscovered that not having tests really sucks when you have to make changes."

Luncht S3E3, UI Testing - Chadrick's Take

Because our second session was a bit difficult I looked up a Plural Sight video on TDD and ASP.NET MVC. It was a very helpful video and led us to the conclusions I've already wrote in my post on Session Two.

After we decided what not to do, Brian did basically all the plumbing for us to implement Selenium tests against various environments. If we couldn't do a view test with TDD maybe we would do a view test with Selenium. Once the plumbing was done we wrote integration tests to validate we had a Registration page and we worked it all the way through to the Successful Account Creation page.

When we got this far we took stock of things and determined that we need to think of the Controller Action as a contract, and test it accordingly. Together we decided we would not be doing the Selenium tests as part of our TDD workflow at all. The third session was profitable and again we learned what not to do, but we are on our way to much more productive sessions in the future.

Retrospective

At the beginning of our session I felt like I had to dig into the recesses of my brain too much to determine where we left off. Those recesses are deep and dark so something had to change. Brian had the solution. He brought up our session doc and added a quick paragraph to that end. I'm looking forward to seeing if that helps us jump right into the code.

MVC Model Binding Feature Request

Model binding is smart but I really wish it would take care of my spelling errors for me ;)

Be Productive - RescueTime

I heard about this service at CodeMash (thank you Scott Hanselman) and I started using it a short while ago. It has literally made this blog possible for me. If you are a knowledge worker who works on a computer, has multiple meetings, email and IM to answer, and other things that distract you through the day RescueTime is for you. Give it a try. The basic version is "forever free" and it's worth it IMH(BC)O.

Paired Programming vs. Getting Input from a Co-Worker

So now that we have some experience in Ping Pong Pairing (PPP from now on), albeit limited, I find that while I'm working through some problem solving I'm also wishing I had another programmer to work along side. It's not good enough to get some co-workers opinion on the matter anymore, even though that's better than programming in a silo. When you are working together on the same code-base, you are both invested fully in the solution. You don't get half-thought-out, non-real-world psudo-solutions (man-I'm-using-a-lot-of-dashes). While doing PPP you are forced to understand the domain context and think through the code together. You are forced to think through the code and come up with a concrete solution together and I think this is a huge advantage verses the advantages or sometimes disadvantages to getting a co-workers opinion about your work.

About time for some contribution

Ok, its about time for some contribution here.  Hi, I'm Brian Krygsman (@brnkrygs).

I'm a software developer.

I think the bug hit me in the early years of high school.  I had spend my younger years playing with the Tandy my Dad brought home one day.  I was absolutely fascinated with it and found all sorts of excuses to interact with it.  There were simple games, and playing 'spy' by typing out word processing documents. It seemed magical to me that you could illicit behavior in a virtual world (or, more accurately at the time an imaginary world) just through tapping on keys.

Fast-forward a bit to high school where I helped found the computer club at the school and began getting more into software.  Karel the robot was where it was at.  I loved tackling and solving problems and Karel presented entertaining problems to solve, while gently introducing programming concepts like branching structure, iteration, and recursion.  Before that I assumed I'd have to be a structural engineer to be "problem-solver" in the way I felt called to be.  But my exposure to software development easily convinced me there was a better avenue for my interests.

I think the aspect of software development that captured me was the endless creative possibility.  The idea that you're building an environment from scratch. You define the rules, you define the structure, you network with other environments if you so choose.  Those poor structural engineers are stuck solving problems in the physical world with all of its complications and limitations.  Fascinating and creative solutions come out of those restrictions of course, and thats not to say that software doesn't have its own level of restriction. But, part of the nature of software right now is how fast it breaks through limits that once were considered hard-and-fast.  Working in software gives me the freedom to solve problems in creative ways, to build fascinating systems and worlds, and to help those around me (and on the other side of the planet!) interact with their increasingly digital lives.

As a professional, I've spent most of my time developing on the web. In college I did a bit of work with Java thick clients, but since then its been on the web. Mostly LAMP stack work (Linux, MySQL, Apache, PHP/Perl/Python), with a heavy dose of front-end CSS/Javscript alongside, but more recently I've been working with Chadrick in the .NET world with C# and Microsoft SQL Server, with a bit of Ruby (Rails) on the side.

As Chadrick said, this blog is mostly an exploration of the Ping Ping Paired Programming development methodology.  Or, this blog has at least been initiated by it.  We're both passionate about improving ourselves as developers, learning as much as possible, and finding a way to implement it.  I'm excited to see where this leads.

Luncht S3E2, Controller Testing - Chadrick's Take

We spent a lot of time writing controller tests and trying to figure out how to get the rendered HTML from Controller.Index() What we didn't understand at the time was that this is not really the way it is designed to be tested. We still learned a lot even though it was learning how NOT to do things.

Basically if you are going to be testing MVC don't try to test the rendered results of a controller action. You can test that the ViewResult has the correct Model and that the View exists by checking for an empty ViewResult.Name, but don't expect to test the rendered HTML. Brian made a good point when he said, "Our views should be stupid. If anything is going to be smart it needs to the be the business layer and the controller needs to know hot to access the business layer." Now that is not word for word, but it's how I heard it. I question if this would be true for heavy client side scripted apps.

Still having a lot of fun with this, so keep an eye out for our future postings.

Luncht v.3 - Password Reset

Not sure if we will get to this feature tonight but I'll try to keep one step ahead of our sessions so we are not wondering what is next.

Password Maintenance

As a user I need to be able to reset my password if I've forgotten what it is or whenever I would like to change it.

• Key Is Created for forgotten Password
  A key needs to be created that will be sent to the user in the form of a link.
• Key and New Password Required for Reset
  If key does not match we will error out.
• New Password Will Be Encrypted
  We never want to see the password so the new one will be encrypted.
• Email and New Password Will Validate User
  If Email and New Password match the user will be valid.
• If User is Validated Password Can Change Without Key
  If the user is logged in the key is not required for password reset.

I think this is doable in one session. If not it's not a big deal.

Luncht v.3 - Session One - Chadrick's Take

I want to start by thanking Brian for trying TDD & PPP. I knew he had (maybe "has") a tendancy to shy away from pairing and I appreciate his openness to try it.

I also want to thank Dan Tape for throwing out the suggestion that we try Google Hangout for our dev sessions. As far as I'm concerned it's as good, and perhaps better than real life. Now we can base our showering habits wholly on our wives desires to be around us. if you have not tried Hangouts, do it and save some soap.

I had pre-written a feature called 'Registration' with a few bullets of acceptance tests to start with. I was basically following our precompiler format. Then because we are both familiar and fans of Pivotal Tracker I converted that item to a story with tasks for each of the acceptance tests.

Registration

As a user I need to be able to register for a new account so that I can use the system.

• Required Property FirstName
  User needs to have a FirstName property and it is required.
• Required Property LastName
  User needs to have a LastName property and it is required.
• Required Field Email
  User needs to have a Email property and it is required.
• Required Field Password
  Password field is encrypted once set.
• Password Field Needs to be Encrypted
  User needs to have a FirstName property and it is required.
• Default Chat Notifications
  During registration users are will be signed up to receive chat notifications.
• Default Deal Notifications
  During registration users are will be signed up to receive deal notifications

When we opened Visual Studio we started with a class library project and loaded NUnit and Moq with Nuget. We had one test at first with all the fields in it, but later refactored it so that each prop had its own test.

[TestFixture(Description = "As a user I need to be able to register for a new account so that I can use the system.")]
public class Registration
{
    [Test(Description = "User needs to have a FirstName property and it is required.")]
    public void RequiredPropertyFirstName()
    {
        // Arrange & Act
        const string firstName = "blah1";
        var user = new User( );
        user.FirstName = firstName;

        // Assert
        Assert.AreEqual(firstName, user.FirstName);
    }

    [Test(Description = "User needs to have a LastName property and it is required.")]
    public void RequiredPropertyLastName()
    {
        // Arrange & Act
        const string lastName = "blah2";
        var user = new User( );
        user.LastName = lastName;

        // Assert
        Assert.AreEqual(lastName, user.LastName);
    }
}

As you can see I've started putting the text inside of Description of the Test. I have an idea for a code generator that would build these tests out with an [Ignore] attribute on them. I might write about this in a future post. But as you can see we build our tests based on the required acceptance tests. Understand properties are not the sexiest of tests to write and perhaps a bit overkill, but it's TDD and we are 100% sure when done means done.

For most of this session we just did domain object tests. They were very basic and that allowed us to practice the Red >> Green >> Refactor Ping Pong Pairing workflow. For those of you who don't know what that is I'll give a quick run-through.

1. I start by writing a failing test. We decided our code had to compile so we had to create what was necessary for that to happen. I pushed the code to BitBucket for Brian.
2. He implemented the code to make the test pass and then checked it into HG and pushed it back to BitBucket.
3. We talked through things if necessary and refactored it accordingly.
4. Now it was his turn to write the failing test, so we jumped down to the next bullet.
5. I implement...
6. He refactors...
7. ...repeat

I was happy how it went. I'll let Brian give his own take on it.