Thoughts

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is an approach for software development combining the advantages of Test Driven Development and Domain Driven Design . It helps the team of the project focus on the exact requirements of the client in a verifiable manner. In TDD, we had acceptance tests that verify the correctness and completeness of the feature once they pass. Those tests are written by the developers at the beginning of an iteration. A weak point though is that those tests were written in a programming language (java, ruby, ..) nothing that the customer can understand. BDD introduces a common vocabulary among all people, that is simple text, something that even the customer can understand and write. RSpec is a ruby framework that helps with the implementation of BDD. It is really an interesting project. RSpec started with what they call now the "spec framework", this framework describes pieces of the application model through by specifying characteristics and actions th...

Jaiku is considered a nice communication method among a group of friends or colleagues in a small company or so. One major strength of jaiku is that it has a lot of notification methods about updates. users can receive notifications through sms, IM or throught jaiku website. I wanted to take a look at jaiku API . so i can use it in any application to send notifications to the rest of my colleagues. the user uses his username and API key to authenticate operations through the API Jaiku provides two interfaces that can be used to read/write jaikus. the XML-RPC and the JSON interface. xmlrpc behaved little strangly always responding with "XML-RPC server accepts POST requests only." even when i'm sending POST requests. i managed to use the json interface though just send a post request to api.jaiku.com/json with the parameters(username, api key, method, message) throught Ruby's irb i can send a note by typing: irb(main)> require 'net/http' irb(main)> da...

One of the wonderful facts about Rails is that most stuff you need is already created for you, keeping you free to customize as you want. ActiveScaffold is one of the most powerful and widely used plugins in rails projects because it simply provide you with a complete CRUD for your model with minimum coding. The default view of the active scaffold is adequate for some applications, but not the most pretty. so is the input types used for the model attributes. Active Scaffold team helps us by providing and easy way to customize by overriding active scaffold defaults . In my application i had a boolean attribute "admin" in my model "user". that was showed as a drop down list having the values of true & false. Pretty ugly. I used partial form overrides to make it the more logical check box by adding app/views/users/_admin_form_column.rhtml with the following content:         is admin ?            'record[admin]'%> ...

Sitting there at the tram on my way to work, when i saw fizo.. a 70 years old fizo. Well, it wasn't our own fizo himself. It was an old man who seemed to be like a future image of fizo. He was thin, had a white mustache and mixed (white, gray) mid long hair on the sides of his head, wore black framed glasses and clean tidy outfit, and moreover, his fingure nails looked something close to those of foze. just wondering how would i look like if i was to reach that age..

I came across this nice post about focusing at work, i'd like to share.. Focus is something of a novelty these days. We’ve got cellphones for texting and calls, IM, Twitter, Email, RSS feeds, Facebook, Myspace… the list goes on and on. If you don’t have ADD before you start working online, it seems it’s almost inevitable thanks to these inputs. If you’re a web worker who uses the Internet for the majority of the day, you’re especially at risk for losing focus. Focus is something that must be fought for. It’s not something that automatically switches on when you want to. You have to make sure your surroundings are perfect for working if you want to be focused. Here’s a few ways I’ve found this to work: Use offline tools . Paper products, pens, and other physical tools are a Godsend for those of us who have a hard time focusing throughout the work day. They’re so simple that we can use them quickly, without having to worry about becoming distracted. Take more breaks . More breaks ...