While I was DRYing up some code, I noticed that a lot of my Sunspot searches were using the same options over and over. Default scope is a nice option in ActiveRecord queries, why not in our searches?

This way you can specify your search options in the Sunspot DSL from each method, while moving repetitive options to a... Continue reading »

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true... Continue reading »

The 7th principle of the Agile Manifesto is:

Working software is the primary measure of progress.

Let's talk what this principle means in real projects, and then get a bit more general as to why it's good.

How does this principle show up in a real Agile process? There's a concept we call "velocity". We assign velocity points for new functionality -- not tickets completed!... Continue reading »

My development setup right now is a VirtualBox Ubuntu Server x64 guest running on OS X Snow Leopard. I use the VBox shared folder feature to share the document root of the sites I'm working on from OS X to Ubuntu, and edit the files natively using TextMate on OS X. This setup has worked very well... Continue reading »

In finance, there is a concept called discounting cash flows. The idea can be summed up as the following: since money earns interest over time, $1 today is worth more than $1 a year from now. Adjusting for the time value of money is called discounting a cash flow.

There's a parallel here. When doing a startup (or nearly any type of software development),... Continue reading »

I think that Roozbeh has a bit too much time on his hands...

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation.

I've previously mentioned we have an IRC channel. That's due to practical considerations. When we need to frequently and quickly share information among a group of people who deal with each other often throughout the day (and are generally on the same page to begin with), IRC... Continue reading »