under_construction is a jQuery plugin that hides or overlays elements of a design that have not been implemented yet. The best part is that it is done completely with standards compliant markup and unobtrusive JavaScript.

This utility works extremely well in Agile environments where there is design work done upfront. I use it extensively and clients really appreciate the ability to see what’s done and not done in a new application.

In this update:

• improved namespacing – no more collisions. To update, your function calls must be of the form $.under_construction.<function name>
• improved opacity – Due to some functions that were recently made available in the latest versions of jQuery, I was able to restructure the overlay so you get a cleaner look over darker backgrounds.

See the demo for more details.

In the future, I’m hoping to add iteration/sprint labels to the overlays so the client or stakeholder can see at what point the feature is going to be built.

Jon Follett and I led a discussion on how designers can integrate with Agile development teams at a recent Refresh Boston event.

I’ve really come to enjoy and look forward to Refresh Boston events. The Microsoft NERD Center is a killer venue, and Patrick Haney (notasausage) does a great job in getting a diverse crowd and stellar speakers.

Of course, Jon did a tremendous job with designing the slides for the presentation

If you attended the talk, please rate and comment on us over at SpeakerRate. We definitely want to continue the learning and discussion around this topic.

Enlight’s own development partner, Jonathan Follett, will be presenting his thoughts at an upcoming New England Web Developers’ Association Meeting in Hudson, MA. He’ll be speaking about how we utilize web tools to build virtual teams on Wednesday, March 25th @ 7pm in Hudson, MA.

Having worked with Jon, and after reading his articles at A List Apart, I can say it will be an interesting and informative talk. Working with Jon and Hot Knife Design has been a great experience. He brings great creative leadership to virtual teams.

For further details, refer to the NEWDA site

Last night I did a talk on Thinking Sphinx at Boston.rb.

The slides are below.

Evan’s blog post with the benchmarks can be found here. There are links to other benchmarks and details.

The process library I alluded to is called God.

Other links

• Thinking Sphinx
• Sphinx
• Delayed Job (for delta indexing)
• Workling Delta Indexer
• Workling
• Starling
• Pat Allen

Let me know what you thought of the talk and the slides. I hope you found it helpful!

The first issue of Rails Magazine has been published. It looks like there is a lot of great content from some great authors.

I wrote an article about my switch from RSpec to Shoulda. A lot of issues I discussed have been addressed by both teams. Please participate in the discussion about the latest development in test frameworks.

I think it’s really cool that Rails now has a publication. Props to Olimpiu for putting it together.