Bob Nadler, Jr.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about how to conduct a Release Planning meeting. This is the follow-up to that piece.

The purpose of an Iteration Planning Meeting is to break down a list of User Stories into tasks to be completed for the...

A few days ago a colleague and I were having a discussion. We work for Cyrus, an Agile consulting company. Another co-worker of ours is (among a myriad of other things) in charge of making sure our clients are billed correctly. As part of that job...

The purpose of a Release Planning meeting is to have a team commit to a release goal in a set of iterations. The output of the meeting will be a tentative release date, a roadmap of time-boxed iterations with User Stories, and a rough estimate for...

One useful pattern I've found when writing Sinatra applications is the command pattern. For those that are not familiar with it, here is a simple example to start with:

class MyCommand
  def initialize
    # initialize some stuff
  end

  def call

If you're not familiar with it, the "Rule of Three" (aka "Three strikes and you refactor") is a guideline attributed to Don Roberts. I first ran across it a few years ago while reading Martin Fowler's Refactoring. Here's the full quote from the book...

I purchased Driving Technical Change by Terrence Ryan as part of a Pragmatic Bookshelf sale a few months ago. Overall I thought it was a good book, though a bit basic. One handy tool I got out of it was the "Skeptic / Technique Matrix". In the book...

Using .slugignore to reduce your slug size

This may be old news to some, but I recently learned about a cool Heroku feature: the .slugignore file.

What is it?

A .slugignore is like a .gitignore file for your app. It is used to reduce the size of...

Update: The pull request mentioned below has been merged and motion-stump clears mocks automatically now, so this after block is no longer necessary.

This one had me "stumped" for awhile. When using motion-stump mocks, you need to clear them in an...

I always forget the syntax for this:

ary = [:a, 1, :b, 2, :c, 3]
Hash[*ary] # => { :a => 1, :b => 2, :c => 3 }

I just started learning about sed and came across one "gotcha" when using the -i option in OS X. The -i option allows you to edit a file in-place. It takes an optional parameter - a string to use as the extension for the backup file. If this parameter...