chrismdp

I've used Cucumber for years, and I've never had a customer write a feature. Customers reading features after I've written them and checking them works much better in my experience.

There is some value in using it when everyone knows Ruby: it forces you to get your head out of the code, using language that your customers understand rather than naturally defaulting to codespeak.

I use Cucumber on my own projects when it's just me, for precisely this reason.

Depends what level of testing, but the Cucumber Book gives great examples as to how to write Acceptance Tests for customers:

http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book

It completely depends how you use it. There's so much misuse of it out there I can understand why people hate it so much. But done right it's an extremely valuable collaboration tool.

I'd recommend the Cucumber Book if you want to read about how to use it well:

http://pragprog.com/book/hwcuc/the-cucumber-book

I've also blogged a lot about how to use Cucumber well here:

http://chrismdp.com/tag/cucumber

I made this yesterday, played it with my kids, and they seemed to like it - so I made a webpage with the rules. You only need a pack of playing cards and a token per player to play.

Let me know if you like it!

I've written lots of web apps using the plain ActiveRecord approach, and I've found it scales well to a given level of complexity, and then becomes hard to manage - hence trying something different.

There's no persistence in your example: how would you plug that in?

The purpose is to avoid a big case statement:

    case(change.class)
    when JoiningError:
      joining_error()
    when SomethingElse:
      something_else()
    ...
    end

It's actually not implemented like that under the hood: it's done using a module with a `send`.

Would be interested to hear what HNers have to say about the relative merits of velocity...

nice article: your images are broken though :(

Excellent idea. There's a reference library here:

http://code.google.com/p/salmon-protocol/

...with the aim of providing "Tools and validators needed to help implementors interoperate." Anyone know if the tools exist yet?

Actually, OStatus is based on RSS - it's mostly just feed.

Fair point.

How about a (literally) one click installation to Heroku?

I'm quite attached to my colour scheme :) but other feedback welcome!

Great thoughts. I especially like the idea of a WordPress plugin to implement the OStatus protocol... looks like someone has already thought of that:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/

Once installed, there's nothing to stop you sharing your entire posts (or snippets) as OStatus messages.

I don't see the user experience of those platforms being on a par with Twitter. Yet.

Cool, thanks. Love that there are others trying to do similar things: we all need to work together as much as possible.

That's how it currently works.

A fair point. Much of the advantages are for developers, not the wider userbase.

OStatus uses "@chrismdp@rstat.us nice post!" style-messages.

This kind of works. Ideally I'd like to drop the leading @ but I guess that'll be hard to do.

Would love to know what HNers think we can do to push this forward.

True. A job title that isn't foisted on you isn't as bad, although it's a label you're applying to yourself. A silly job title you make up is harmless.

The danger for people that do one thing for 8+ hours a day is that they specialise too much. Their comfort zone will reduce to match exactly what they're doing and they'll stop learning. A good team lead or PM will keep switching their tasks around and keep stretching them.

I'm kind in agreement about this. $0.25 a week really is tiny.

Just to second this one: I've used DNSimple for years, and it's an awesome product. I can't imagine doing DNS without it now.

So after all the furore on HN surrounding the choice of platform for this game, a friend urged me to point out to everyone you can now get the alpha :)

Here are the original HN posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3440596 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3470164

The Ruby community is exemplary in this regard, something I totally took for granted.

Thanks! I may still do that, if I makes sense to do so and I can distribute it easily enough.

The joys of iPhone autocorrect :) thanks.

Yeah, thought about it (Gosu was great for getting started), but decided I wanted to get back to fundamentals and switch to a slightly lower level framework to aid my understanding of what's really going on under the hood.