Head On

As I have been in charge of setting the administrative infrastructure at WeMind I continuously tried to use web based systems to limit the number of systems administered by us. We use Google Apps, Basecamp and outsource all our servers to Mathias and colleagues at GlobalInn.

We have however run into problems when trying to find web based services that are preferrably local to Sweden, like accounting. Even if marketed as “web based”, they are all based on Internet Explorer using ActiveX or some other proprietary part of IE. As we use Macs at WeMind, these services are as available to us as any software packaged as a .exe file.

I tend to see this in Sweden and not as much in other countries, or am I wrong?

Robby Russell is a constant source of information on Ruby and Rails, I have used his instruction on how to set up Rails and PostgreSQL on Mac a number of times. It is therefore fun to see that I have actually used 3 out of the 5 things he wants to know more about::

RSpec User Stories

We were very early adopters of this one, we started using it the same day it hit trunk in a useable form. Everyone should start using it today - I cannot speak highly enough of it. The only thing I miss is a Fit-style table approach to rules, but I have my own thoughts about that one.

Using Selenium with RSpec

We have used the now outdated spec/ui library at WeMind. Today we use RSpec Stories almost exclusively for acceptance testing. My position is to use Selenium only where you really need it, for example to test Javascript functionality.

JQuery

I have used it for the dynamic hiding of speaker info for Agila Sverige. Not at all enough to judge a library by, but it feels a lot sweeter than Prototype/RJS.

JSSpec (BDD for Javascript)

Yeah, I wanna know more about this as well.

Using the Google Charts API with Rails

Same here.

Other than that I would love to try out:

• Seaside - I have dabbled with it but nothing worth mentioning.
• CouchDB

• We have a release, it is friday, going to Urban to celebrate his 40th birthday with other WeMind’ers. All is good. #

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I’ve been using distributed version control for over a year now, and if it is up to me, I will never use a centralized VCS again.

When I evaluated the alternatives last year, I choose Mercurial as the DVCS we are using at WeMind. The reasons were:

1. Usability - git was quite obscure back then
2. Speed - bazaar and monotone was quite slow
3. Large enough uptake - OpenSolaris and Mozilla started using Mercurial at the same time.
4. Runs on all platforms, if we ever employed someone who wants to use Windows
5. Built in Python which could be a good think if I ever wanted to extend it

A year later we are happy with Mercurial, but the landscape has changed. In particular I am seeing a huge growth of people using git, especially within the Ruby community. Which in itself is something I am happy about.

The biggest reason I see for git’s resurgence is git-svn. It allows people to start using git locally while still having Subversion as the backend, and when everyones ready the switch is easy.

There is a hgsvn in the Mercurial world, but it is read only, so you cannot push your changes back to Subversion. I strongly believe that the Mercurial community should focus on this if it wants to regain its momentum.

Git still has weak support for Windows, but that seems to be a non-issue in the Ruby world.

I am pretty agnostic about which DVCS will be the dominant one. The most important thing is that people are moving away from the centralized VCS’s.

For a great post on the subject, read what Dave Dribin has to say about it

I had to straighten up the CSS for our public website, and I thought of looking into YUI Grids as I had heard lots of good things about it. It took me less than two hours to completely redo the layout, and the the end result was a better design, less custom CSS and better browser portability. I am a convert.

I came back last night after two great days of conferencing at Smidig2007 in Oslo, Norway. The mornings where all lightning talks and the afternoons where reserved for open space discussions. I gave a lighnting talk on the experiences we have had at WeMind trying to implement a lean enterprise, and I initiated two open space sessions, one on the GUI artists role in an agile process and the other on what makes different languages have so different communities and cultures. I will expand on those in later posts.

During the two days I had the pleasure of hooking up with Niclas Nilsson, Aslak Hellesøy and a bunch og other great people. It was very stimulating discussions and I am really motivated into doing a few new things with our own testing/speccing.

It was all in norwegian, so all you non-scandinavian speakers out there are really missing out on something - finally a reason to take that class in swedish or norwegian you always thought about.

Photos and a few deeper comments are due later, but for now: a big thanks to my norwegian friends for a great time.

I just got an email saying that my lightning talk proposal for Smidig2007 was accepted. I will speak about the experiences we have had at WeMind when trying to run a lean enterprise.

I am really looking forward to this conference, it is all lightning talks and open space.