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So, those who read this blog will have picked up that it has been gathering dust as other projects have soaked up my time and energy. Which is not a good thing as I firmly believe that blogging is a important reflective practice that makes me better at the other things I do.
Anywho...
So the "stuff" I mentioned above is mainly two things, a great gig writing perl code and secondly working for the European Judo Union and International Judo Federation on their IT teams. The EJU and IJF stuff is amazing and awesome and great, but I'll save that for my blog over at http://www.judocoach.com
The perl stuff has been awesome too.
Perl was the first language that "stuck" for me, the first one where I really truely got beyond Hello world and occasional hacking. In Perl I discovered creating stuff. Later PHP took centre stage, but Perl held a special place in my heart.
Recently (ok since about October 2011), I had a chance to write lots of perl code in a corporate environment and damn has it been great.
Perl as a language for some reason reads nicely for me. It has a rhythm that makes sense to me. Beyond that it has flexibility and power. It has CPAN and it has a strong community. So returning to Perl has been really enjoyable and writing code everyday is great, you learn something new all the time and that tangible improvement is addictive.
I'm also lucky as I work on a small agile team using the scrum methodology. I am enjoying scrum alot as it really encourages you to work hard and fast, but in short bursts (sprints, tasks and pomodoros). It is a flexible framework that encourages the team to improve it's own working habits and processes, so during and after each sprint there is lively debate over what we do well, what we do poorly, what we can change, what we should change etc etc. Scrum teams are self-organising, so everyone is encouraged to take responsibility for the team and contribute. It's really enjoyable.
I operate partially as a member of the dev team and partially as the scrum-master for two scrom teams. I am enjoying the technical coding side and the more human oriented helping the teams side.
One of the things that we have done (self-organised) is moved to a Continuous Integration way of working using unit and functional tests powered by Jenkins-CI tool. Being a Perl shop we use Test::More for the unit testing and the TAP plugin and Jenkins to pull our code from Git and test it when changes get merged into the main code base.
The flow-on change from this is our gradual movement towards purely test driven development. I have experimented and tried to work that way in the past and even blogged on this site about it in the past. Working that way again has been great and encouraging others to work that way is great too.
What I find is that at first there is a struggle to make the change, but once you strike gold once or twice and write a chuck of code in the TDD style; you get hooked and realise how much time and pain it saves you. That time saving is real and untill you get it right a couple of times I think people struggle to believe that all the test first effort will actually work for them.
So I am really busy, travelling a lot and working hard writing code plus delivering live video streams for Judo. Add to this my coaching at two Judo clubs and running local kids Judo events and I have been stretched pretty darn thin.
But I am getting the balance right more often now and with the lul in the Judo calendar due to London2012, I hope to recover a bit before launching solidly into the last part of the year!
Stay tuned as I hope to blog more frequently as I get the balancing/juggling right.
Anywho...
So the "stuff" I mentioned above is mainly two things, a great gig writing perl code and secondly working for the European Judo Union and International Judo Federation on their IT teams. The EJU and IJF stuff is amazing and awesome and great, but I'll save that for my blog over at http://www.judocoach.com
The perl stuff has been awesome too.
Perl was the first language that "stuck" for me, the first one where I really truely got beyond Hello world and occasional hacking. In Perl I discovered creating stuff. Later PHP took centre stage, but Perl held a special place in my heart.
Recently (ok since about October 2011), I had a chance to write lots of perl code in a corporate environment and damn has it been great.
Perl as a language for some reason reads nicely for me. It has a rhythm that makes sense to me. Beyond that it has flexibility and power. It has CPAN and it has a strong community. So returning to Perl has been really enjoyable and writing code everyday is great, you learn something new all the time and that tangible improvement is addictive.
I'm also lucky as I work on a small agile team using the scrum methodology. I am enjoying scrum alot as it really encourages you to work hard and fast, but in short bursts (sprints, tasks and pomodoros). It is a flexible framework that encourages the team to improve it's own working habits and processes, so during and after each sprint there is lively debate over what we do well, what we do poorly, what we can change, what we should change etc etc. Scrum teams are self-organising, so everyone is encouraged to take responsibility for the team and contribute. It's really enjoyable.
I operate partially as a member of the dev team and partially as the scrum-master for two scrom teams. I am enjoying the technical coding side and the more human oriented helping the teams side.
One of the things that we have done (self-organised) is moved to a Continuous Integration way of working using unit and functional tests powered by Jenkins-CI tool. Being a Perl shop we use Test::More for the unit testing and the TAP plugin and Jenkins to pull our code from Git and test it when changes get merged into the main code base.
The flow-on change from this is our gradual movement towards purely test driven development. I have experimented and tried to work that way in the past and even blogged on this site about it in the past. Working that way again has been great and encouraging others to work that way is great too.
What I find is that at first there is a struggle to make the change, but once you strike gold once or twice and write a chuck of code in the TDD style; you get hooked and realise how much time and pain it saves you. That time saving is real and untill you get it right a couple of times I think people struggle to believe that all the test first effort will actually work for them.
So I am really busy, travelling a lot and working hard writing code plus delivering live video streams for Judo. Add to this my coaching at two Judo clubs and running local kids Judo events and I have been stretched pretty darn thin.
But I am getting the balance right more often now and with the lul in the Judo calendar due to London2012, I hope to recover a bit before launching solidly into the last part of the year!
Stay tuned as I hope to blog more frequently as I get the balancing/juggling right.