Sprint Afterglow
Posted by Daniel Lyons Mon, 29 Jan 2007 06:51:54 GMT
This is just the first of many posts about the Method Arts sprint I participated in tonight, but I wanted to jot a few things down while they’re fresh in the mind.
- Rails migrations are the best thing since sliced bread. Every database developer needs this pattern. However, it would be nice if they supported things like foreign key constraints. I was skeptical at first but now I’m a believer; Lance was right.
- Subversion should be central to all team development. I’ve been saying this for a long time, and you know what? I was right. We were all editing the same files at the same time and not having any problems. We had three conflicts all day, and all of them were easy to resolve. Basically, you fix the damn file and then do “svn resolved path/to/file” and then commit. Simple.
- I suspect, but I haven’t tried this, that a good thing you could use unit tests for without drinking the kool-aid would be to make a test for every bug you do fix. That would at least prevent recurring bugs, but wouldn’t imply the kind of massive annoying testing infrastructure that the cultists are advocating. I’d like to think on this more.
- Rails needs a good way to take an ActiveRecord database backup. It was inane to write migrations to create records. I’m sure there’s a better way but we couldn’t find it today.
More to come.
I’m right there with you. Not ever having used Subversion before, I was impressed with how easy it was to master the basics. I like your idea of preventing regressions by writing tests for fixed bugs. Hopefully I can start putting together my thoughts for the day before I forget the details. I’m impressed that you actually put together some coherent thoughts at the end of that long, tiring day!
GREAT working with you yesterday Daniel. It will be a week, and several sessions on my therapist’s couch before I’ll be ready share my thoughts. Just kidding. We haven’t had our coffee yet this morning, and there’s already talk about finishing what we’ve started. Let’s talk soon! :)
Daniel, it was really fun to meet and work with you. A lot of talented people all together makes for a really fun day. I find it pretty funny that you posted that 8 hours ago, with as tired as you were after the long sprint. Great work and I hope we can do some fun stuff in the future! I’d be surprised if we dont.