I’m reading a lot of books on Agile at present, I figure this will help me de-bunk some of the Agile buzz on the web at the moment. I just finished reading Practices of an Agile Developer this morning.

I’ve seen an increasing amount of criticism about Agile methods, the primary response to this criticism is that those criticising are not practicing “Agile” correctly. My goal is to try and improve my own software development practices therefore I wanted a clear understanding of what “Agile” is so I can do it right from the start. Read the rest of this entry »

Steve Yegge, a Google developer, has posted a lengthy article on good and bad agile where he dismisses discusses Agile methods and Google’s work practices. This is a lengthy post but if nothing else reading the comments is worth while since some intelligent responses have been posted.

This has popped up in a number of places in last couple of days.

Is it just me or are all the cool kids using Mac’s these days? I’ve not used a Mac since primary school – we’re talking mid 80′s!

I’m eager to give TextMate a whirl and see if I can produce code at half the rate of those guys in the screencasts. I’ll soon get the opportunity since I recently accepted a job at a Mac shop!

(some who made the switch aren’t entirely happy).

Free time has been scarce recently but I’ve slowly been working my way through this tutorial on Ruby. I figured I’d cover all the basics before jumping head first into rails.

Ruby feels like a step forward in programming compared to a step sideways when I’m learning Java. For example, Java and Ruby both have automatic memory management yet in Java there are still four different sizes of integer (byte, short, int and long). Whereas Ruby being more human than machine orientated simply has integer.

A useful feature I’d like to see make it’s way into PHP are the attr_reader, attr_writer and attr_accessor attribute visibility functions. These save a fair amount of code you’d otherwise have to write in PHP and Java when providing accessors and mutators.

I’ve only scratched the surface so far but I can already see the appeal of this language – it’s succinct and the code to functionality ratio is refreshing.