Trello Rocks!

Almost a year ago now we started doing daily "stand-ups" and tracking progress on story cards with a view to becoming more agile.

I like the idea of getting everyone together and talking about the tasks at hand and having some way to track that work that is simple and tactile.

The problem is the paraphernalia... You can't move the board easily if you wan't to relocate, its not easy to attach documents to the wall and a lot of people's handwriting is illegible.

I'd spotted Tello on hacker-news some time back and thought it looked like an amazing tool but attempts to push it at work had met with: "But then we have to track tasks in two places"
(That wall was going nowhere; it was the only remaining artefact of a, very expensive, agile adoption attempt).

Just recently a handfull of our most awesome rockstar developers and myself landed a pretty cool "Friday project" that we would be self-managing.

So we went with Trello and it has been nothing short of a joy to work with.

The bulk of that joy comes from the fact that rather than standing round a bunch of cards in a stuffy office we can sit in a coffee shop, scoffing croissants and flicking tasks around on Charlies iPad (trying not to get jam all over it).

We also have access to it anywhere... If all of a sudden we remember something that was missed or have a question we can just bring up trello on our phones, tablet or laptops and throw stuff in there.

We've also given the client access to our board so, at any time, they can log-on and see how things are going, follow the links to our showcase environment, watch videos of walkthroughs, etc.

What are you waiting for? Get you some Trello!: https://trello.com/

Using Java github repo's from Clojure

This week after watching Mike's lightning talk on bloom & count-min sketch algorithms I found myself hacking away at a Clojure implementation of a bloom filter and needing to pull in a Java project from github (a murmur hash implementation).



Here's how it's done:

1. Add the following line to ~/.lein/profiles: [lein-git-deps "0.0.1-SNAPSHOT"] under :user :plugins, like so:
2. Form the command line run: lein deps
   
   
3. In your projects project.clj file add the following: where :git-dependencies is the github url of the repo you wish to use and :java-source-paths is the path where Leiningen will find the source code to build (note: it will be downloaded from github into a directory .lein-git-deps/ by default
   
4. From the command like run: lein git-deps
   
   
5. Add an import statement to your clojure files:

My first lightning talk

The tech-talks at work have fallen by the wayside since they no longer have an "owner" so during their downtime I've been arranging lightning talks as they're far more informal and take a lot less time to arrange.

My first talk in front of an audience at work was during these first run of lightning talks. I was joined by four colleagues: Daniel, Mike, Mark & Charlie (blog) who talked about:
Bundler, Sketch algorithms, Fictionary, CAP theorem & Riak

Deciding to be a bit cute I chose the subject of "Speed" for my first lightning talk and aimed to address the issue of choosing a language for a given project based on the ability to learn it, write it, execute it, run it & fix it.


Speed from James Doig on Vimeo.

Five minuets is not a long time and that is quite an in depth subject, well you live and learn and hopefully it will serve as a good warm-up for my full length Clojure talk in a couple of weeks.