http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php Copyright 2013, Lance Wicks Lance Wicks en-US SPHPBLOG 0.5.1 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry130410-162619 so life on the new team was short lived; I am back in the Perl team and working on a new "Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD)" project. This is a relatively new approach for the Scrum team I work on and a new part of the product we are testing.

ATDD for this team is basically automating the running of tests that confirm that the product "does what it says on the tin". In other words, we are creating a barrage of tests that run regularly (hourly) and confirm that the product conforms to a set of formal documents. These documents range from standards from industry to product specific behaviours.

Rather than testing edge cases and behaviours, what we are mainly doing is testing the products output in standard situations. Confirming that as it iterates towards the production version the standard outputs remain constant. In our case we are working on something new, so we are coding tests for things as or in places before the product actually does what it should.

So our test dashboards are turning red now, and slowly turning green as other teams enable the functionality we are testing. It is a interesting and rewarding way of working. You setup a test and see it fail, then some time (days or even weeks) later, it magically turns green when the other teams release the latest version of the product and the test starts passing.

One of the key things we did early on was tie our tests to the specification and standards documents. This has proven to be really key as we have in the test results (specifically in the failures) references to shared documents. So when we say to a member of another team "oph hey, feature x is failing because the widget says bing instead of bong" and the person knee jerks a response like "oh thats how it should be". We are able to say "REALLY???... Thats not what document X says. It says it should be bong, see right here on page 42..."

This is helpful for preventing the very human thing of batting things from one team to another as an immediate reaction to someone on another team saying what you have done is wrong. It's a programmatic way of solving a human problem.
We are using code that refers to documents to prevent people arguing. :-)

Beyond this aspect of $dayjob, the team is continuing to develop it's use of TDD (Test Driven Development) and Pair Programming with mixed results.

]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry130410-162619 Lance Wicks Wed, 10 Apr 2013 21:26:19 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=13&m=04&entry=entry130410-162619 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry130204-170045
Thought I should write something to clear my head. This week I head to Paris with the IJF to work at the Paris Grand Slam judo event. Should be good. I am taking my Raspberry Pi with me and then I'll be sending it with colleagues until I meet up with it again in Samsun Turkey in March. I hope I have it setup correctly!

On the $dayjob side of things, this month marks a small change in my role in the office. Whilst remaining the scrummaster for my old team I become a dev team member of a new (related) team. The change is minor but interesting.

My old team is a primarily Perl team, doing console server applications. In the new team as well as Perl, there is PHP and Javascript involved in an internal web application. So I'll be brushing up on my PHP and getting a daily dose of PHP and JQuery.

It's one of those interesting changes in situation that comes along and if you roll with it you learn a lot along the way. I am fortunate that as the existing scrum master for both teams, this is not a case of meeting new people. Sure I have to learn a new codebase and coding style and standard; but I know the team members and all that good stuff.

Back on the Judo side, but locally. My club(s) are going strong; the Southampton club just regained the third place position in the Hampshire Team Championships and we are preparing for the Hampshire Individual Championships.
I am the competitions organiser so it was great to see a good turn out for the team championships and to be seeing entries for the individual championships coem in steadily already.

Anyway... the only real issue is the old work/life balance.
I'm doing my usual trick of burning the candle at both ends and in the middle. :-) Stay tuned for updates on things.

Lance

P.s. hello, if you are reading this please let me know either in a comment or via email. I am always curious if this cathartic exercise of blogging is purely for me, or if there are people out there reading these words. ]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry130204-170045 Lance Wicks Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:00:45 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=13&m=02&entry=entry130204-170045 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry121118-064558
Writing Node has been a bit of a brain twister. All the callbacks, anonymous subroutines. It makes my head spin at times. Fortunately Node has a good body of Google-able information and is pretty good structure wise. That said, being a Perl guy, the temptation to switch to Perl grows as what I am trying to do gets more complex.

Which brings me to why I think node is good. Much like Perl, node has a nice repository of shared modules for doing things. The NPM which is like CPAN. Basically, much like Perl, when you decide you want to do something tricky the first thing you do is go looking for a NPM module that does it already. Which is the way you do things in Perl, search CPAN and find the tool that best fits.
So when I wanted to listen for UDP packets, easy just load the dgram npm. Sent a tweet, load the Twit NPM. Need to write to a couchDB database add in nano. Want growl notifications on my Mac... yup load up the Growl NPM. Easy and Simple.

Having written and tested on my Mac, I have tested on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi is a brilliant little machine, cheap and easy. But for what I am doing I need very little resource. Just a linux box with connectivity. I have added an extra ethernet port via the USB socket which works. That way I can be listening on one network (a private LAN) and use the second port to tweet and write to the database via the internet connected port.

It's been easy to manage via github, the toughest part has been my lack of a windows physical machine. So I have been running teh socreboard in a VM on my mac and that has been a pain in the butt as just getting pings backwards and forwards has been challenging... still working out why.

Anyway, off to China then Japan next week, so lots of time on planes and hotels to work on the project. :-)

Lance]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry121118-064558 Lance Wicks Sun, 18 Nov 2012 12:45:58 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=11&entry=entry121118-064558 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120917-165800
I really like the fullscreen terminal window, it gives me lots of screen real estate for my SSH session (with GNU Screen).

It's good, but it was not quite 100% what I wanted, mainly as that mouse thing kept getting used. My Judo shoulders don't like a mouse much, so I try to limit how much I use a mouse. Unity helped especially with GNU Screen, but something was missing.

So lots of Googling and understanding what I wanted later, I was running the Ratpoison window manager in a VM to test it out. A little more testing and exploring and now I have Xmonad running and making me (and one of my team mates) happy with our almost entirely keyboard driven desktop.

Xmonad ( http://xmonad.org/ ), is a tiling windows manager for Linux. That basically means that rather than the "desktop" metaphor with window panes sitting "on top" and overlapping one another; I have windows that tile automatically on a workspace.

When you first login you are greeted by a blank screen, workspace 1.
I press ALT-SHIFT-RETURN and a terminal opens up fullscreen. And I mean FULLSCREEN. I have the menu bar turned off, no status bar, nothing but a terminal session and a single pixel red border.

For me, I then SSH into my main dev server and type "screen -dR" which connects me back up to my GNU screen sessions. In screen I get multiple sessions that persist even if I get disconnected from the server (handy when working from home or elsewhere). I tend to work in VIM and use Screen to have "tabs" for editing multiple files.

Screen makes this easy CTRL-A then c, creates a new "tab" where I can vi a new file. CTRL-A CTRL-A switches back to the original tab. I can have loads of "tabs" and get to them with CTRL and the number of the "tab". My normal modus operandi is to have tab 0 for running unit tests and doing git checkins. Tab 1 for my unit test script and Tab 2 for the code I am working on.

With Xmonad in the mix, I have the nice new ability to open up a second (or move) terminal session locally with ALT-SHIFT-RETURN. This (by default) splits the screen (workspace) in two down the centre vertical line of the screen. If I repeat the process I get a large tile across the top and below it two smaller sessions below it tiled evenly.

I can move tiles with ALT-J/K or change the tiling pattern with ALT-SPACE. It;s very cool and once you get used to the key sequences, it's super fast and means you don't need to take your hands over to the rodent.

I'll write more on Xmonad in a later post I think as it is "the business".
I've not even started to play with the many many customisations for Xmonad, I have the two most basic ones that bizarrely perhaps are not installed by default on Ubuntu. Those being dmenu and gmrun. They, along with Xmonad itself is a simple apt-get away; give it ago.]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120917-165800 Lance Wicks Mon, 17 Sep 2012 21:58:00 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=09&entry=entry120917-165800 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120704-132620
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.]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120704-132620 Lance Wicks Wed, 04 Jul 2012 18:26:20 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=07&entry=entry120704-132620 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120411-144028
Xbox, Wii, Playstation, Nintendo, flash games, Scratch, Bin Weevels; it goes on and on.
It's what he loves and especially things like scratch.mit.edu are where I try and push him with the hope that it will encourage him to learn more about the world of technology and how games and computers generally work.

Recently, I discovered "Gamestar Mechanic" and interesting site that lets him play a young game player come game game designer who must go through a variety of quests Pokemon style.
Whats nice about the site is that it teaches game design not just game playing. The NPCs in the quests and the levels in the quests teach him about how games work and he gets to design his own games too.

Embedded below is one of his first attempts, a two level affair. Which I must confess I can't beat, give it a go! :-)

]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry120411-144028 Lance Wicks Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:40:28 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=12&m=04&entry=entry120411-144028 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry111207-152144
I have mainly been doing PHP web stuff for the last couple of years, so it's been interesting looking at Perl again. Coming back to Perl has reminded me how nice a language it is to work in and how many powerful tools it has.

What is interesting coming back to it is noticing how much talk there is about how Perl has lost ground to PHP, Python, Ruby etc. There is the Modern Perl movement and a push currently to up the social media war. For example the "Ironman" challenge trying to get modern articles on Perl online.

What has not changed is Perl 6 is still vapourware prety much.

Anyway...

So Perl Best Practices is great, especially when coupled with PerlCritic.
My tendency is to work like this:

1. Run PerlTidy on whatever code I am working on.
I have some local standards setup to match the style of the team I work with.

2. Hack away
Preferably I "try" to start by writing a t test file or a script that automates testing the script I am working on when the code is not a module. So TDD with unit tests where possible and TDD with regression testing when a script.
I'd love some guidance in this area if anyone wants to comment.

3. Run the code through PerlTidy again

4. Run the code through PerlCritic.
I have this setup at level 3 or 4 currently. Depending on how clever I am feeling or how messy the code is, I tend to run PerlCritic over and over at different levels and try and fix up as many things as I can.

5. Commit the code and get a colleague to review the code.

6. Fix the changes recommended and send it back fro review again until it passes.

7. Merge it into the main codebase.


It's been great to get back into Perl and I shall post more about it over the coming days, weeks, months. :-)

P.s. If you are interested in Learning Perl, you should check out Gabor Szabo's Beginner Perl Maven course on Udemy.
]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry111207-152144 Lance Wicks Wed, 07 Dec 2011 21:21:44 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=12&entry=entry111207-152144 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry111103-155247
The talk is the v2.0 of the original DIgital Natives talk I gave at the University of Bath in 2008.

In the talk I tried to cover in a fairly short time what a digital native is, what social media is and why either of them matter. I also added a section on Social Hardware or the "Internet of Things" and how it relates to coaching.

Anyway... I was able to take a video of the talk and here it is:





Lance
If you can't see the video, try it on Archive.org:
http://www.archive.org/details/DigitalN ... lMediaTalk]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry111103-155247 Lance Wicks Thu, 03 Nov 2011 20:52:47 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=11&entry=entry111103-155247 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry110926-164907
The idea for running a Marathon has been bubbling under the surface for quite a few years. Mainly thanks to the Pheidipidations podcast from Steve Runner. I've previously run a ten mile race and a half marathon (January this year).

As with my half marathon, I used a training program from Runkeeper.com.
Sadly, unlike the half marathon, this time I slacked off the last two months before the marathon! And that is what did me in!

I had been training like a trooper, keeping to the program, fitting in the scheduled runs. But unfortunately for me, all that great base work was wasted. The way my run went proved the old adage that "Piss poor preparation, leads to piss poor performance".

When I look at the mile times I did, I also suspect I went too fast too soon. I didn't feel like I was running hard, but all of my first 5 miles were run under 9:30 pace. In fact only two of my first 10 miles were over ten minutes per mile.

After about 15 miles it all went horribly wrong. From about 16 miles my leagues were cramping and the going was bad, really bad. I tried to walk some of it off, but I was walking REALLY slow. The alternative was trying to run through the cramps, but that hurt and tended to generate more cramps.

I was hurting and came very VERY close to quitting a bunch of times. It was on reflection, interesting how my mind played tricks on me. At about 19 miles for example; I decided a marathon was only 23 miles long. So I only had 4 miles to go. A couple of miles later, my mind realized that a marathon is 26.2 miles. Weird. Two miles of confusion.

I don't know where it happened, but around the 23 miles mark, the sweeper vehicle caught me up. The sweeper, is a van that comes around and picks up stragglers or hands out disclaimers saying you are outside the end of the race and you are on your own.

Being caught by the sweeper van, spurred me on and I managed to catch up with the van and overtake it and get "back in the race". Shortly afterwards I was overtaken again; then overtook it again with maybe two miles to go. And I stayed ahead till the race finished!

Coming down the final length, I was greeted by my wife and my twin 8 year olds. And they ran with me the last 200 yards or so and the ordeal was over!


I am very happy to have finished the race, it hurt like hell. But I am pleased I finished. One of the little conversations I had with myself, was saying that I had to finish, else I would feel like I had to run another one so I had actually completed one… and there was no way I wanted to go through that again.

The interesting think about running the 26.2 miles that makes a marathon is that you body is not designed to do it. You can't run that distance without training, nutrition, hydration and lots of perspiration.

It is obvious to me that the last two months of training is key to a marathon. I had hoped that the base training I had done would carry me through; but it was no where needed. I needed a lot more miles under my belt and more long runs.

I had good hydration and nutrition, plenty of sweets and carb gel packs. And I drank at every drink station (approx every 4 miles). Which was something i worked on and planned for.

The legs were what gave out. And today I know they gave out bad. I have a sore lower back and also pain around my lower ribs. I am presuming the lower back is form the strain and the ribs from the grunting, groaning, wheezing and swearing and of course gasping for breath as I tried to run.

I should have seen it coming, the last few runs I did managed to fit in that were of reasonable length (8-10 miles) I felt some discomfort/pain in my upper thighs/hips. This was what I felt at about 10-11 miles into the marathon, before it expanded and blew up into full blown cramps shortly after.

It was rather an emotional experience, I was a broken man by the end. I gave it my all, more than I knew I had in me. I managed to finish in a poor time, but I finished just inside the official race period (out running that evil sweeper van).

I don't desire to run another marathon, I am happy to have completed a huge challenge. Even if I didn't get the performance/time I had hoped for.

An ordeal, but the marathon is supposed to be an ordeal, a trial. I made it the full distance and that is enough for me, I feel like I discovered and exceeded a physical/emotional/mental limit within myself. And for that experience the 5 hours and 40 minutes of pain was worth it perhaps.
]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry110926-164907 Lance Wicks Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:49:07 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=09&entry=entry110926-164907 http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry110806-125617
So, running, yeah doing a lot of that. I am running the New Forest Marathon in Spetember and am on week 9 of my training programme for it. Running 4 times a week, last month I ran 123 miles! My training runs include upwards of 15 miles. I have found running in summer has it's own set of problems (compared to last years winter training programme).

I have also been very busy Judo-wise. Coaching two clubs as well as my recent involvement with the European Judo Union and International Judo Federation computer teams. This has been a great new thing in my life, I LOVE IT! I get to go to some of the top Judo competitions and do my IT thing with other people who love Judo and IT. This month for example, I get to go to the Cadet and Senior world championships. How cool is that!
Earlier I went to the Moscow Grand Slam, which was amazing both on the side of Judo and of course going to Russia. I had forgotten till I got there that I really was fascinated with Russia in my mid-late teens. I was lucky enough to get a quick tour of Moscow before departiung and got to walk Red Square... WOW!

IT-wise, blogs and podcast are neglected as a result of the two items above I guess and also because of my latest project "CarMindr", which is my response to that "has my MOT expired??" panic. I've built and just launched a simple email and text message reminder service. It is different from other services out there as it is simpler and does not make a "land grab" for peoples personal information. My feeling was/is that the service should give value for any personal information it collects; not just get that info as a matter of course and then try and spam people.

I launched on Monday and so far the traffic is growing steadily and reminders in the system are growing steadily. Please do check out the site and let me know what you think.

Another project that I have been involved in is the 2012 Commonwealth Judo Championships. I am the IT director for the project, working with my JudoSpace colleague Dr. Mike Callan to put on the most innovative and exciting Judo championships you could imagine! It's going to be amazing! It is being held at the Wales Millenium Centre, which most people recognise as that place on Torchwood. It's an amazing venue and the format includes shows for teh finals blocks that include not just Judo but singers, dancers, bands and other performers! (All to be confirmed of course).

Well, the rain has dropped down to slightly wet, so I had better run.]]> http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/index.php?entry=entry110806-125617 Lance Wicks Sat, 06 Aug 2011 17:56:17 GMT http://www.lancewicks.com/blog/comments.php?y=11&m=08&entry=entry110806-125617