mwynholds

Why was the jump in women attendance so much higher between 2013-2014 than 2014-2015?

were you running wordpress? i think the traffic that HN sends crushes wordpress specifically. who knows... maybe it's just our wordpress config. we're gonna port it over to a static site generator anyway.

honestly, i think it's time for us to move over to jekyll

we have super-cache enabled and the apache KeepAliveTimeout down to 1 second (which killed us in the past). but hacker news still sends a crushing amount of traffic.

perhaps it's time to run our blog on node...

This post is getting some pretty interesting discussion on the blog. It's clearly a topic that people have strong feelings on. I'm interested in the thoughts of people here.

Pair programming is kind of team-by-team... ie: not every team is able to reap its rewards. So I understand if you've not had success with it. But I have worked on dozens of projects pairing, and I have seen the productivity gain. And that doesn't take in to account the gain is code quality or the developer training/learning that takes place.

As for TDD... if you think that testing doubles development effort then you're not doing it right, or more likely you've never done it at all. Ditto about TDD being incompatible with improving UX. That's just not true.

I love it! As rails matures and is used on bigger and bigger projects, it starts to look more and more like Java. It used to be all about rapid development... but now we're all talking about performance, and threads, and service layers. Thank god node.js is here to remind us that we really don't need any of that crap.

This is a decent post, but why did you decide to use CoffeeScript? It seems like just another hurdle for people trying to learn Backbone.

There's a pretty long answer to that question. User stories are a critical piece of XP (eXtreme Programming), and Tracker is a project management tool targeted directly at XP teams.

But you have to buy in to XP in order to see the value of User Stores or Tracker.

I'm glad Cuke decided to dump web_steps. Features written with those steps really did look terrible. However, I think there is a fine line to be careful of. You can pretty easily wind up with a near one-to-one correlation between features and custom steps. But writing good features and steps should take the same skill and care as writing good code.

A few of my own thoughts:

1. ALWAYS start on time. If people miss the daily or show up late, that should shame them in to getting there on time. (This is true of all meeting, not just standups, in my opinion).

2. With geographically disparate teams, the leader should establish up front an order for when locations speak in the standup. (ie: San Francisco, then London, then Mars). The leader should always kick things off, and then should specifically identify which person goes next, next, etc.

3. No lurkers at all. If you're there, you do your daily. Even if you say "I didn't do anything yesterday, and probably nothing today... no blockers", at least then we know. And nobody is wondering who the f* you are.

4. Most dailies should have follow-up meetings / conversations come out of them. If there are none, then either you are talking about too much stuff in the daily, or nothing interesting is happening on your project.

This post is interesting, and I am interested in Clojure. But I'd like to see some more posts about real-world Clojure usage.

Nice! This might be the final reason to abandon RubyMine.

This stuff is nuts. I really need to get deeper in to vim.

we are flattered by the similarity, not angry