At one of the Indianapolis Lean Startup Circle meetups, someone asked questions along the following lines (paraphrased): Won’t using lean startup techniques reduce my commitment to an idea? If I can just walk away from something because I have not invested much in it, how do I know that I won’t give up too early? [...]
I brought up RailsThemes in an earlier post, and figured I’d post an update about how we are working on it and what I have learned so far. RailsThemes is a project that I’m working on with Eliza Brock and Luke Flener. It is like WordPress themes, but for Ruby on Rails applications. Basically you [...]
In this article, I argue that today will always be the best day to try or learn something new. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks (well you can, but it’s hard) Neuroplasticity is the brain’s way of reprogramming itself based on what it does. Your brain actually changes structure with new experiences. Brains [...]
Since leaving RewardSnap in the summer of 2011, I took about a month off, and then got back to business. This post is an update of what I’ve been working on and interested in since then: Current projects and interests: RailsThemes.com (new project!) consulting/contracting Awesome Controller Desperately Seeking Validation office hours Hamming Lunches RailsThemes.com A [...]
Jan 13 12
RR for Test Doubles Presentation
Here is a presentation that I gave to the Indy.rb Ruby user group in Indianapolis. It covers the advantages of using RR (double Ruby) for concise mocking and stubbing and gives some real-life use cases to inspire thinking about testing using test doubles. (Having trouble seeing the slides? Try here.)
With the popularization of lean startups, minimum viable products (MVPs) have recently entered into business and software lexicon. Who can argue with building more than you actually need? Many people seem to interpret MVP as the first iteration of their product. Once they build that version, they can add more features, and users of the [...]
Last month I gave a presentation about making recommendations with Apache Mahout. Since the presentation, Manning books has released the final version of their book, Mahout in Action, which should be an even better resource than the book that I was using for my slides and presentation. Here are the slides: (Having trouble seeing the [...]
