Baroquebobcat

Last night I read the first chapter of what will become Rails 3 in Action. So far, I really am enjoying it.

One of the things that frustrates me the most in my own projects is this feeling that things need to be big and get abstracted before they can be useful. I guess it might be a hold over from being a student and wanting to over achieve, or maybe just the classic problem of the hobbyist who tinkers but never manages to really build anything.

It is a gumption trap, to use a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance-ism; a thought that sort of stalls my work on a project.

“How will this be useful to anybody?”

“How can I get this to a usable state?”

I think I am getting better at this problem, but sometimes I feel like I have this irresistible urge to over-architect things that gets me into trouble.

What this has to do with Merb in Action?

Well, the thing I thought was really cool was where the authors linked to the pastie that started it all, clocking in at ~120 lines.

I look at that and I think two things.

1. I usually over think things
2. I can do this.

The beginning of merb is completely grokable. It reminds me that something doesn’t need to be fully designed. It just needs to be useful enough.

or you could just say:

YAGNI

You Ain’t Gonna Need It.

YAGNI is part of the reason why I have been trying to use BDD in a more disciplined way. By using the Feature->Spec->Implementation workflow, there is less temptation to add neat features on the backend that are never used. I have worked on a number of projects where I ended up writing more code than I needed, than was used.

Writing from the outside in helps to manage that some. After all “no code is faster than no code.”

I just ordered Ruby in Practice and Rails 3 in Action from Manning(they had a one day only 45% off promo).

The Rails 3 book won’t actually be coming out for a while, but in what I think is an ingenious publishing move, people who preorder can look at drafts of chapters as the book is worked on. It reminds me a little of how Lawrence Lessig is doing the next edition of his books. Except of course totally different.

The thing that makes them similar is the added participation of future readers. It isn’t that this is a new idea. People have been soliciting comments on publications for as long as they have been around. Technology just changes the timescale and the scale of the projects.

Anyway, cool.

Right now, I have Ruby in Practice and through the fourth chapter of Merb–Rails 3 in Action. More later.

Sweet.

After yesterday, I have a lot of grokking to do. And, some projects to start.

The talks, like the day before were great. And having the opportunity to talk with so many people about what they do with ruby was enlightening.

I wanted to write up my thoughts about yesterday, but they haven’t really congealed yet.

Short summary:

• Ruby is awesome.(of course)
• I need to be more aware of my metaworkflow
• Rhodes looks really slick.
• Adhearsion would be fun to build something with(eg a podcast engine)
• Destroy is a funny word to users(rails)
• Of the bicycle gears of software development,cucumber is the outmost one
• Suite.add(test) if test.value > test.cost
• be extremely pedantic when you first start trying to use a new methodology–even if it sucks(in the ‘man, why all this typing’ sort of suckage you know makes you want to be lazy).
• don’t confuse concise with terse.
• maybe I should try to make a theramin sim with the wiimote
• energy not time is the most precious resource