Noel Rappin Writes Here

And now some testimony from Brother Nicely-Nicely Johnson, I mean, James Turner, from O’Reilly Radar: The Cult of Scrum: If Agile is the teachings of Jesus, Scrum is every abuse ever perpetrated in his name. In many ways, Scrum as practiced in most companies today is the antithesis of Agile, a heavy, dogmatic methodology that blindly follows a checklist of “best practices” that some consultant convinced the management to follow.

In true blog form, a declarative statement: Hear ye, hear ye! Any so-called Agile team that ever tries to translate “points” into actual units of time is presumed dysfunctional until proven otherwise. You’ve done it, I’ve done it, we’ve all done it. Doesn’t make it a good idea. In the spirit of my last post, allow me to over-explain. A typical Agile project handles estimation by splitting the project up into smallish user stories and assigning each one a point value, typically between one and five, though different teams have different standards.

Having shifted from editing on the book back to actual writing for a few new chapters, I’m back to obsessing about examples. (The book, of course, is Rails Test Prescriptions coming soonish to a bookstore or computer screen near you. Tell your friends.) I feel like I spend way more time obsessing over whether I’m picking good examples than the question actually merits. Or to put that another way, I’m pretty sure there’s a difference between a good example and a bad example, I’m much less sure there’s a difference between a great example and a good example.

Here’s a little RSpec design question. As I’ve probably mentioned in various spots, I don’t naturally take to the RSpec massively-mocked style of testing. However, I’m currently on a Rails project that is using that style – unit tests don’t touch the database, functional tests don’t touch the models. It seems to be working for them, they certainly seem to have stuck with it over the course of this rather complex application.

Pragmatic wants November to be PragProWriMon, something of the non-fiction alternative to NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. It’s a great idea. The best way to actually write anything is to get in the habit of sitting down and typing. Conversely, the best way to stop writing something is to break the habit, even for a couple of days. There are other places to go for inspiration on sitting down and writing (I’m kind of partial to Merlin Mann’s epic about making the clackity noise).

I hate Microsoft Word. That’s not the only thing that caused me to want to do this book this way, but it’s in the top five. That’s what we in the writing biz call “a grabber”. Right? Feeling grabbed? The usual complaints about Word aside — it’s bloated, the UI is hopelessly busy, managing complicated layouts is nigh impossible… um, it’s possible I’m not leaving those complaints completely aside. Let me try again.

With respect to this request to link to early web stuff, I think the oldest HTML page I coded that’s still online is my Georgia Tech home page, circa 1997-8. Note the creative use of ugly nested tables. I don’t think that any of my earlier web stuff has survived… no, wait, one other thing. The site dates to, I think 1997, it can’t be much earlier because it has a broken Java applet (which was basically just a fancy animated gif).

I’m granting myself amnesty for about six months of unreviewed books to mention a couple of recently read books. Pirate Sun, Karl Schroeder I think that of all the authors I enjoy, Schroeder is the most criminally under-read. If you like SF, I tell you that Virga – the background of Pirate Sun and its two predecessors – is the coolest SF construct since Ringworld. Schroeder could write novels in it for the next forty years and only scratch the surface of what’s possible.

It’s been a while since I lost my geek heart to a TV show that was so obviously doomed. Which brings us to The Middleman, on ABC Family of all places. I had been avoiding this on the grounds that it was just a silly-looking summer series and also the whole obviously doomed thing but a series of positive mentions on io9 and other Web sites (including a plug by Justine Larbalestier) led me to try the thing once.

I have about seventy-million little things to say about this movie. I will try, and probably fail, to keep this brief. Spoilers definitely ahead: The movie is really, really good. It’s not flawless, but it covers it’s flaws through a very strong sense of what Batman means and doesn’t mean as a character, and also because it’s very intense. The movie spends most of the time feeling like its on the very edge of chaos and conflagration – it’s probably the first time that I’ve genuinely felt that the hero wouldn’t “win” in superhero movie.