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.

Jon Follett and I did a lightning talk on swooping in to save projects from epic failure at Ignite Boston 5. It seems to be a topic that the audience had an interest in. We looked at our experiences and set out to provide some useful tips.

We had 5 minutes to get our points across. It was challenging but fun. It was a great event and there were lots of other great talks.

The slides are below.

To place further emphasis on the message – communication is a vital part of every project. We’ve inherited so many projects going wrong just because people aren’t being honest and open with each other. Communicate to educate, define norms, and demonstrate progress. These are not nice to haves in your projects – they’re requirements.

Do you have a project that needs rescuing? Contact us so that we can make your software idea a reality.

Fast and Easy Selling. That’s what we set out to make happen last quarter. Well I’ve been very busy over the last few months. I’m very proud to present Gazelle.com. The team has been working incredibly hard, and the development effort shows in the quality of the release. We’ve relaunched the service under a new brand (we were formerly under the guise of Second Rotation), and I can’t describe how pleased I am with the results.

I talk about it in depth on this blog – what makes a good Engineering team? After this effort, I would say balance, efficiency, and determination. All the skills of the team really came into play here. The group all went above and beyond to make sure that this release was a huge success. I’d like to thank Thos Niles, our product manager, Jason Wadsworth, our architect, Graham Babbitt, our front end developer, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, Brian Kaney, our development consultant, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, and James McElhiney, our CTO. Their efforts exceeded all expectations.

We’re currently hiring and we’re always on the lookout for solid developers. Right now, we’re focused on finding a project manager and a release engineer. Take it from me, this is a stellar group to be involved with.

There’s so much learning in how this project went. When things calm down a bit, I’ll be sure to post more about the specific knowledge gained from a development process perspective.

What a cool day. Here’s a quick summary of everything I attend:

• Jeremy Kemper’s keynote – Rails 2.1 is getting released! Awesome changes to migrations (no more migration number collisions), timezone support, tighter integration with memcache. Coolest of all and something that always bugged me in ActiveRecord – being able to check is an ActiveRecord object was actually modified. The introduction of the changed? method should be very handy.
• Mingle – I love Mingle. I checked out this talk because I wanted to learn how to really use Card trees and aggregate properties (some new features in Mingle 2.0). I ended up finding out some really cool functionality that I didn’t know existed (read: project variables). After every iteration rolls by, I previously had to go in and change all the views to reflect the change in iterations. Now, I can do it in one place with project variables. Rock!

• Advanced Restful Rails – I thought this talk was pretty cool. He addressed a lot of patterns that do not fit in the stereotypical resource generator. I really dug the overall message – there’s really 2 steps to making a good restful architecture. It’s really that simple, and it’s not far off from good Object Oriented design.

  1. Identify your resource
  2. Expose the methods you want to

• Fast, Sexy, and Svelte: Our Kind of Rails Testing – this was a good talk. Mainly impressed with DeepTest – it runs your RSPECS in parallel rather than sequentially. For acceptance testing, the recommended Selenium, but I actually prefer SpiderTest. It’s not so dependent on markup and is done in memory rather than in browser

• Integration Testing With RSpec’s Story Runner – yet another great talk on testing. I’m still not sold on stories as part of the RSpec framework, but I’m at least willing to give it another try after David’s great walkthrough
• The Great Test Framework Dance-Off – Josh gets my talk of the day award. This was a totally unbiased look at three popular frameworks RSpec, Test::Unit, and Thoughtbot’s Shoulda
• The Great Kent Beck – I have to be honest, I didn’t get a lot out of Kent’s talk. It was cool to reminisce about TDD, but I didn’t get inspired. Honestly, Q&A was the best part of the keynote.

So today I attended:

• Keynote – Joel Spolsky is pretty entertaining, but I didn’t get a lot of substance out of his talk. He touched upon keeping users happy and what it take to do it. Overall, a humorous way to kick things off.
• Entrepreneurs on Rails – this was really inspiring. Dan Benjamin shared his experiences and some of the pitfalls. It was great to get some insight from someone that’s walked the path I’ve wanted to: start off as a service oriented business and break out into some product based businesses.
• 10 Things I Hate About Web Apps – I honestly wish I attended a different presentation. The end was ok, as the speaker introduced LimeLight – it looks like it could compete with AIR – what I liked is that it runs on JRuby – so anything with a JVM can run it.
• Faster, Better ORM with DataMapper – this was probably the highlight of the day. I really think DataMapper could be a replacement for ActiveRecord in the Rails framework. I’ve played with it when I was looking at merb. Better handling for legacy databases, eager and lazy loading. When version 1.0 comes out in the Summer, I will definitely look at it as a primary Ruby ORM.
• Flexible Scaling – this was a great talk. I’ve been playing with Amazon EC2 (a scalable way to create infrastructure/hosts), but now I’m even more intrigued. What’s interesting is that the speaker is hosting his database cluster off of the cloud
• UI On Rails – Connecting Designers and Developers – I was kind of disappointed with this one. It seemed like it surprised a lot of people to give Designers access to source code, but Kyle seems to handle it without issue.

Overall it’s been a fun day, but man am I exhausted. My favorite session was definitely the one on DataMapper. I’m hoping Rails adds similar ORM options and configuration like Merb.