Kicking off second year of Comunidad Prode

We are just a few days away of a new season of the Argentina professional soccer league, which in terms of Comunidad Prode, means the site second year of life!

During the off-season (and a little before too), I have tried to focus on upgrading the site, in order to bring end users always a better experience. That means, keep up with the latest and greatest versions of frameworks, gems, etc, as well as improving performance by running different set of profiling tools. Major list of upgrades are as follows...

• Upgrade rails from 3.2.x to 4.0.0, going through the beta and rc releases
• Migrate from ruby 1.9.3 to 2.0.0
• Along with that, update tons of gem dependencies!
• Perfomance enhacements
  

  some more perf (not pert as just tweeted :P)… @ComunidadProde pic.twitter.com/2uALVHOoGt
  — Fernando Di Bartolo (@fdibartolo) June 8, 2013

  some pert improvements that will come soon along with #rails4 @ComunidadProde pic.twitter.com/cokoaStr4S
  — Fernando Di Bartolo (@fdibartolo) June 8, 2013

• Decoupling classes, increase code coverage, and much more...!

As of now, we have around 1100 people playing on the site, and we look forward to, not only have more players, but to enrich experience of current ones!!

Screencasting the RomanNumerals kata

In every aspect of life, it is known that practice something will make you better at it. Sportsman practice long hours before a given competition, musicians practice as well before performing on stage, but us, software people (developers, architects, etc), not always do the same thing.

Quoting Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob) in his book The Clean Coder, "you should plan on working 60 hours per week. The first 40 are for your employer. The remaining 20 are for you [...] you should be reading, practicing, learning, and otherwise enhancing your career. [...]  During that 20 hours you should be doing those things that reinforce that passion [towards software]. Those 20 hours should be fun!"

That said, I have decided to record and share this following kata, hoping that someone picks it up and get contagious, in a good way :).

Audio is in Spanish thou, bummer, I know.

Closing... If you haven't read The Clean Coder, and now you feel like doing it, I humbly suggest reading Clean Code first.

20th anniversary of Ruby, version 2.0 is out!

Ten days ago or so, the first stable release of ruby 2.0 was shipped, so I decided to give it a try. Since I had to do a few things to get it working, I list them all below as a cheat sheet for myself, or others as well...

First of all, I should mention that I run OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion.That said, let's see.

Get the latest version of RVM and check if I am missing any required package:

 $ rvm get stable  

 $ rvm requirements  




In my case, openssl is what I needed to install, but other scenarios might be different.

 $ rvm pkg install openssl  

Then, when I tried to install a gem, i got an error like the following:

 ERROR: Loading command: install (LoadError) 
 cannot load such file -- openssl

That might be because there is an incorrect reference to the openssl config file, so, let's see where it did install, and then provide the correct path

 $ find . -type f -name "openssl.cnf"  

 $ rvm install 2.0.0 --with-openssl-dir=[path_found_above] --verify-downloads 1

After that, everything went fine.
In order to check all ruby installations your system has, you can run:

 $ rvm list  

Version 2.0.0-p0 should be there, and if you want to make your default, do:

 $ rvm --default use 2.0.0  

Even though you make any given ruby version the system's default, I humbly suggest creating gemsets per directory, with its own version of ruby and gems. For further reading about gemsets, check this out.

Speaking at January monthly meeting of Agiles Buenos Aires

Last Thursday 17th, the monthly meeting of the Buenos Aires Agile community took place at the MUG. In this opportunity, Gastón Algaze and I have facilitated once again (we don't mean to bore people :)) our session presented at Ágiles 2012: El tamaño Si importa: los desafíos de escalar scrum.

Different from Ágiles, where the talk was time-boxed to 50 minutes in order to fit in the agenda, this time we had a nice 2-hour slot to extend the debate, and drill down whenever the audience required so. 

I am dropping the slides below one more time, in case you have landed here without reading the original post. With not much more to say, I don't want to leave without thanking Adrian Eidelman and Martin Salias, the organizers of this meetup, for giving us the chance to present once again. Thanks!

Agiles 2012 - Size _does_ matter: Scaling Scrum from Fernando Di Bartolo