Remember one recent post when I talked about the Code Kata that I attended? Well, Micah prepared a screencast version of that Kata and that video is now available. It's a short screencast (14') and even if Ruby is not your cup of tea, it's interesting to watch BDD being practiced. Langston's...

I just came back from the first meeting of the Software Craftsmanship Group . Tonight Micah Martin talked about Code Kata but added an extra facet to it. Micah proposes that, although practicing the Katas by yourself, in your spare time, is valuable, presenting your routine to an audience can deliver...

It's so rare to find interesting group meetings up here in Suburbia that I can't pass the chance to attend new ones. As Micah Martin announced , the Software Craftsmanship Group was created and the first meeting happens soon. One of the topics for the evening will be Ruby Kata . Should be fun...

I have a friend that is very much into Design Patterns and wanted to learn Ruby with a more applied perspective of the language. I went the exact opposite direction. I know a little bit of Ruby already and I wanted to improve my limited patterns knowledge. What we had in common is that we both picked...

One thing I realized when working in large companies is that Excel is the true data exchange file format. That what the business types exchange among themselves and how they like to persist any kind of lists or anything that needs to be formatted like a table (be it tabular data or not.) All too often...

In one of the projects I'm working on we produce a number of XHTML documents and we want these documents to be valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. As an example of how automation will set you free , I promptly thought that there was no way I would be submitting several dozens of documents to the W3C XHTML validator...