March 2010
1 post
So, here’s the thing. Is it better to do server maintenance on a day when most of the staff are available in the unlikely event of anything going wrong?Or on Day when a few are in and any problems will have to be discovered by everyone arriving for work?
Surely in any server environment there is provision for maintenance that doesn’t come with a caveat that it might all go wrong.
July 2009
1 post
End of day.
Finally starting to feel a bit more comfortable with SASS, but a little annoyed that I feel I have taken too long on basic aspects of the CSS /HTML that i’ve been working on.
At least i’ve slogged through my own optionitis and will try to concentrate on making decisions and seeing them through tomorrow.
May 2009
1 post
Working on CSS with CSS Edit today. Started of a bit of a slog, with me suffereing from my usual lack of confidence.
Realised that the only way to work through it is to keep going and be driven by things that need to be done.
So, I’ve been trying to make the views in the app consistent, along with trying to work out what I need from the 960 framework, and what I need to add that is...
April 2009
2 posts
Can we change the color?
Recently read some documents from work, and despite my own promises to myself to not get worked up about things find I can’t help myself reacting. I find my motivation plummets each time one of these idiotic documents comes out, though I do derive some black humour from the contributions by people clearly unaware of the sitcom “The Office”.
Maybe by venting my spleen in words I...
March 2009
2 posts
Going forward.
The past week or so has felt a little like a belated New Year, now that our contractor has left and other projects are demanding our attention. It feels like an opportunity to take stock, have a little breather and dive in to the new things we need to do.
It’s quite exiting to have some more variety of projects to undertake, but I hope we can continue with the Agile methods we’ve...
Just noticed a twitter tweet from someone at the University linking to and pointing out a silly example of a blog post that has been put up.
I’m refraining from naming or linking to them because i don’t want to distress either. However, it did get me thinking. It seemed a curious thing to do; to link to an example of a colleague doing something daft and then draw public attention to...
February 2009
3 posts
Wrestling with GIT again, but thanks to the helpful people on IRC I have a better understanding of what went wrong. All fixed now
This week’s retro went by pretty quickly, I only had one thing to show since I missed half the sprint, and other things continue to be difficult to launch.
Somehow though we managed to do loads more points, which at least bumps up our average.
Learnt some things about myself this week. Remembered that I really enjoy creating images, and consequently shouldn’t be surprised that at the clamouring from content people to have a go too.
I’ve been creating some postcards for print, which I need to finish off tomorrow, and it’s be interesting to rediscover the process of being creative with imagery. As soon as I worked...
Blimey, it’s been 13 days since I last posted. Where the time goes is a bit of a mystery. I know that 5 days disappeared under a blanket of snow last week.
This week I’ve been pretty happy that I managed to clear some of my more technical outstanding jobs and got cracking on creating some designs. However, I did find it harder than expected to get the creative juices flowing, not...
January 2009
6 posts
Business like retrospective today. We rattled pretty quickly through the tickets for the week with only one rejected for further work.
I’m liking our use of pivotal tracker, and it’s great to have all the relevant info in the tickets so we can quickly remind ourselves what each ticket means.
If we carry on like this we might actually get our average points for the week to start...
This week has really flown by. I seems only yesterday that we were doing the retrospective and here it is again.
Little frustrated this week, I seem to have spent most of my time organising a meeting, helping sort out a GIT problem,writing instructions and remembering lots of things that need adding to our project tracking.
Consequently, I haven’t managed to have a good run at mockups...
Well, at the end of the day, we managed to get ourselves in a right tizzy with GIT. Our pulls and pushes seem to have all gone funny.
As with lots of of things with GIT I have a fuzzy idea and understanding of what went wrong, and an idea of how to proceed.
It seems that the command filter-branch is a mighty powerful one and running that on the repos changes the history such that the object...
Today, we had our first retrospective since we’ve started using an online system. I found that a definite improvement on the physical cards, and it was good to have the things in front of us ready to go.
More than can be said for the team itself unfortunately. If the retrospective is all about what we deliver during the iteration, then I guess we all need to get much better at...
Online Agile System
It’s been a week since I last talked about work and how things are going. Mainly because most of my efforts have been to pick up where I left off before the holiday. I think I’m back up to speed now, and have some changes to report on our implementation of Agile development methods.
Previously we had been using in the first instance, physical cards stuck on a whiteboard with user...
Back in work after what seems like a long Christmas break (not that I’m complaining).
Glad that I haven’t completely forgotten every GIT command, and indeed everything I was doing before the break.
Considering Pivotal Tracker for our project management. It seems like it’ll do everything that we need, and some things we hadn’t conosidered.
December 2008
6 posts
Designing a Cucumber Logo
Not a logo for Cucumbers as a population, you understand, but a speculative logo for software, Cucumber
Been enjoying myself working on a speculative logo. I’m enjoying the iterations and different directions and ideas that come when one gets going.
You can have a look at some of the ideas on
One thing I’m finding tricky is staying away from the wiki a bit in case people think...
Managed to finally get some selenium viewtests working, but had a bit of trouble along the way targeting a window opened with javascript. Since that was the reason for using selenium in the first place I needed to get it working.
I eventually managed to get the selenium to target the opened window and check for the existence of text on each of the sites the links led to.
I then had a bit of...
Ended the day as I began, struggling with Selenium view testing.
Will take a break to turn 39 and have another crack on Friday.
Started helping the new guys set up their shiny new iMacs today, though in truth there’s not a lot of help needed.
With a few commands rails is swiftly up to date, a good set of core gems is ready to go and GIT is installed.
MySQL might take a little work - ie follow a tutorial, and then the boys can get cracking on their work.
It’ll be interesting to see how they get on with...
Had to leave retrospective early today, so I will need to catch up tomorrow. Before I left I managed to demo the content that I’d brought over from our Instiki install.
It wasn’t straightforward since the git-wiki didn’t like the format of the filenames (with spaces) which meant that it was not adding and commiting changes to the repository.
It’s a nice idea to use a...
Been looking at how to get a load of files from our reference wiki into a git repository with a web front, provided by the clever git-wiki.
Seems that there’s a problem with whitespace when adding files to the repos and of course there’s all the html to get rid of.
After some experiments, the HTML renders ok, but probably best to get rid of the layout divs and let git-wiki take...
November 2008
12 posts
Watch
I thought this week’s retrospective was good and bad. Good that we have two new recruits to work on a new project, and it was good to talk them through some of the ways that work and would like to work.
The bad bit was that after we are done telling the new guys about how we work we don’t then back it up by demonstrating what we are talking about in practice.
If we are gonna...
It’s not a work day today - indeed it’s the sabbath for some, but I thought I’d post a collection of thoughts in lieu of my daily ponderings.
In this week’s IKO we were a little cautious about what we commited to, so see if we can get our sprints back to fulfilling what we commited to. There were some big numbers that are apparently very close to finishing and we are also...
Got a load of scenarios written today, and began work on a blog post explaning things to the rest of the team prior to using them to aid in coding the features described.
Also attended a curious meeting that discussed images and how the organisation handles images. Curious because I thought a lot of what is needed is already possible. Images are interesting because they sit pretty squarely on...
Writing features and scenarios
Still writing stories, which is turning out to be much harder than I’d hoped. I’m finding it hard to pick a suitable level of detail that would enable someone to code the behaviour. It all comes down to what assumptions we can make. Probably safest and clearest to explicitly state the behaviour, which is making things pretty time consuming.
I’ve taken some of our existing...
So, few things coming out in the wash this retrospective.
Good that we seemed to get it off our chests about the way we are writing the stories that make the tickets. I think after all of us have experienced frustration at work we haven’t sufficiently defined and that came out. Perhaps we will now do that work up front and make the actual work easier. I hope that we have some tickets...
Seem to have worked through a very frustrating phase today, when I had to work from home (which was fine) whilst not having a really clear idea of the work needing doing this sprint (bad).
Speaking to Funky Bunch, he agreed that our tickets are still too vague. This issue seems to have persisted for a while now. It with that in mind that I’ve been looking at the various options for us...
Feeling good about tickets today. Perhaps I am a simple creature that is easily duped into a sense of achievement by small tickets. I’ve managed to get some things done, and the little tickets serve to oil the wheels for the big ones.
Of all the 8 retrospectives that we’ve had so far I found this one the least satisfying. It was gratifying see work done in the to demo, and good that Sarah introduced a new method for tracking the tickets as they get raised. It should help when we need to dip into the backlog, to see what the priorities are.
So the clients went away happy.
I was interested by Kev’s introduction to...
A day late on my daily summary of work, for no other reason than playing with an electronics kit with my kids.
Started the day with ‘messy’ ticket; by which I mean a ticket that included interactions with people and trying to make sense of documents that we’ve been sent. In fact, one of the clear things coming out of the agile process is that writing code, or dong design can...
Picked a ticket off the board today that had been rated at 5 points, which in retrospect was probably about right, but I hadn’t factored in getting my local install of that site up and running since it’s been a long time since I’ve done any development on that site.
This brings me to something I’ve noticed that is puzzling and frustrating in equal measure. When I, as a...
October 2008
17 posts
Retrospective today was strange from my point of view because the story card that I did recently meant that I’ve been thinking a lot about how we report and let people know what we are doing, but it is a little frustrating because it’s not as good as having the product ready. Sometimes we just have to wait a little bit.
I’m very much in favour of taking the shortest route to...
Missed 3 out of the 7 sessions of this sprint so far, so not surprisingly have found it tricky to get the god feeling that comes from building momentum.
It has been interesting to discuss how we are going to let people who what we are working on and what is coming up. I personally think that the act of writing what we’ve been up to is very valuable to keep the project rolling along, as...
Dead Set by Charlie Brooker - E4.com →
Great programme so far, I really like the idea of playing the credits online. Giving proper credits, rather than the cursory zoom by.
Interesting retrospective today, where we discussed how we are all going to take what we are currently learning and build on it.
As a group it was felt that we need to get better at learning what Darrin is doing so that we can develop and understand when he goes. I guess that six months is not that long and we need to be up to speed on all the things we’re working on by then.
Have to admit I’m struggling to get to grips with things in the sprint today. For the sprinit concept to work we need to be working on the things that we have committed to for this sprint, and not allow ourselves to get sidetracked, but one of the problems at the moment is that there aren’t many things left on the board for myself to do.
Now I can respond to this by picking things...
Thinking about our backlog of story cards and how we get to them. I’m beginning to see a pattern of us doing the most recently created cards, because they are freshest in our minds.
Perhaps we need to include some card meta information? If we had info about when the card was created we would have an idea how long things have been hanging around for, and how important they are. I guess we...
Kick off of sprint number 6 today. Pretty short meeting, since we had a lot of things left over from last week that we are pretty close to finishing.
Then spent longer than I wanted trying to get some admin viewtests working, but we seem to have a decent set of tests working, which is a decent base to build from. As with most tests it seems that they will be easier when we build them from the...
It seems like last weeks’ sprint was the sprint of the big tickets. Loads of points invested in time consuming and sometimes vague tickets, leading to uncertainty about how much progress is being made. Working on larger tickets like that can be a slog, so ‘m hoping for some smaller tickets that get things moving. They somehow feel more like progress.
Demo during retrospective was a...
Back in the swing of work today, after a few days off. Was intrigued to see what delights were going to be on the board for me to do, and alas, nothing too exciting, but more testing.
I feel like I’ve taken too long already, but I also know that I haven’t been wasting time, I guess I’m just finding it pretty hard. Today’s tests went a little quicker, so I’m hoping...
Gonna miss the team’s retrospective tomorrow, which is a shame because this week seems to have flown by. I feel like I’ve been really working hard trying to understand viewtests, xpath, selenium and a little bit of RoR. I have understood and used a bit of all of the above and think it won’t be long before Ed and myself has some view tests that we can let run and see whether we...
Reading a little about acceptance testing, and starting to see the role that testing could play for us. Still not sure about the view testing that I’m doing. I couldn’t come up with a compelling reason why we are doing them. Hoping that it will become clear why we do them.
With regard to acceptance testing it seems that the intention is to relate the acceptance test to the story on...
Just finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Thoroughly enjoyed it and there were plenty of moments where I stopped and pondered.
I was especially interested in the part where is was clear that even though our subconscious is pretty fast it still needs a little time to process what is happening and react. It seems a wise course of action to get used to stopping and thinking before acting....
We planned some stuff today. After the last sprint we were a little more realistic in the amount of points we scored things and the amount of detail we put in the story cards.
I hope that should help, though I have noticed that we are trying to load the cards so that there is enough work to be distributed around the team. I thought (maybe wrongly) that the idea of the board was to get more...
Oh, also sat in and assisted with some baby steps in the world of user testing. It was fascinating to get a fresh perspective on not only Glamlife, but other sites too. It was very good to be reminded just how much terminology that we take for granted at the University that new students have no idea about. This is something that really needs to be addressed to make our sites and services usable...