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.