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February 2013 – Aliens Kickoff!

February 19, 2013 Agile / Aliens / Meeting
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Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal, on Flickr

Alien Faces Vector Image by Vectorportal

Date: Thursday 28th February 2013

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Alien Invasion Kickoff

This month we will get started on the Alien Invasion project.

The main repository can be found at https://github.com/agilestaffordshire/Alien-Invasion-Coding-Challenge .
To work on the code, begin by forking the repo in your own account and work from there.
Rob Stothard has been added as a collaborator. Ideally at least one more person would be useful. Let me know if you would like to step forward.

Rob has kindly configured and hosted a TeamCity instance. A DNS record has been configured to point to http://teamcity.agilestaffordshire.org. TeamCity is currently configured to watch the Github repository and build on commit.

The site is hosted at http://www.kidd.org.uk/AlienInvasion/. I am currently trying to get a cname of  http://aliens.agilestaffordshire.org working but am experiencing problems. I have contacted the hosting company to see what can be done.

For task management, an AgileStafforshire organisation has been set up at trello. So please set up an account and pass on your account name or email address to be added to the group.

Outline Agenda

  • Code review – It would be useful to familiarise yourself with the code before the meeting
  • Characterisation tests – Can we wrap the existing code in tests to avoid regressions?
  • Add ported code from SqlServer to MySql – The code already exists and just needs committing
  • Definition of initial goals – Where to begin and where do we want to go?

Hope to see you there,
Neil.

December 2012 – XPDay Lightning Talks

December 3, 2012 Agile / Meeting
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christmas decorations

Christmas decorations by Vanessa Pike-Russell, on Flickr

Date: Thursday 13th December2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Social

We have not planned a particular theme for this meeting – simply a lightning talk and a good social event.

XPDay 2012 Lightning Talk

Last month Paul Williams kindly offered to give a lightning talk covering his ( and Neil’s ) attendance at the XPDay 2012 conference. As we had a busy evening planned with Ashley’s excellent Kanban introduction workshop, Paul kindly agreed to move his lightning talk to start of this months meeting.

Christmas Menu

Ann, from The Stafford Ale House , has kindly passed on their Christmas menu. To ensure that she has sufficient stocks for our orders she asks that we pre-order on the Sunday prior. (9th December). Note that it is not absolutely necessary to pre-order. Please see the menu below and lookout for the specific google groups thread to get your order in.

 

Hope to see you there

Neil

November 2012 – Kanban Introduction

November 11, 2012 Agile / Kanban / Meeting / Software Craftsmanship
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Simple-kanban-board-

Simple kanban board via Wikimedia Commons

Date: Thursday 29th November 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Introduction To Kanban

At last months meeting, due to technical problems, we didn’t get round to the Minisculus Challenge. However we did discuss the idea of extending the Alien Invasion project.

The catalyst of this project is that back in  June one of the ideas was that we should work on a project together. When we first tried the Alien Invasion we found that, due to a dependency on a client side library, participants were constrained to a .net implementation. In the discussion following there was a consensus that it would have been better for the clients to be language agnostic.

The intended outcomes of the project are:

  • To refactor the code so that it can be used via any web enabled language.
  • To act as the catalyst for discussions at our monthly sessions

It was agreed that Kanban would probably be a good fit for our project management needs, as it doesn’t specify fixed iterations. Additionally a number of the group, while being aware, have not used Kanban “in anger” so it was decided that this months session would be an introduction Kanban.

By happy coincidence Ash Moran is running a getKanban session at madlab in Manchester on the 24th November.  I’m very pleased to say that Ash has agreed to come in and run the “short” game play session for us. I will be going to the Saturday MadLab session and at the time time of writing there are still places available, join us if you can.

 

Hope to see you there

Neil

October 2012 – Minisculus

October 21, 2012 Agile
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Creative commons

An Enigma Rotor Courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org

Date: Thursday 25th October 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House

Location: Google Maps

Minisculus Challenge

The Minisculus Challenge is a web based programming challenge originally written for the Software Craftsmanship 2010 meetup. This is great fun and pretty addictive.

I won’t write too much about it as all the info is at the site linked above. In short you need to program JSON restful requests against a web based service to obtain questions and submit results. It is language agnostic so bring along your laptops and favoured envronment. We will organise the structure of the challenge on the evening.

 

Alien Invasion

Some time back, Paul Williams ran a session where we programmed against a web API. The code for the project was originally written as a test bed for a tool called NCrunch. The upshot of this is that the client section of the software is a .net dll. A number of session attendees raised the point that the .net dependency was a pain and it would be better to be language agnostic. In our ideas session we have listed “lets do a project together” – well here is an idea. We can refactor the alien invasion code to be all server side and maybe restful.

Paul Williams has offered to put together a few slides. We can then discuss the project, with a view to development practices, infrastructure and so on. Bring your ideas.

 

See you there

Neil

September 2012 – Anagram Follow Up

September 19, 2012 Agile / Kata / Meeting
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Date: Wednesday 26 September 2012

Time: 19:30 start.

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Map

It’s a follow up session! Bring your laptops and other programming apparatus. Last month we had a great session with the Anagram Kata. This month, we shall follow up with some interesting turns involving the same Kata. We shall assume the roles of developers that have happened across some code regarding Kata and have acquired responsibility of maintenance.

Trade your solutions from last month for a piece of code that you have not seen. There’s plenty of implementations in various languages in the comments section of our August post (Objective-C, Java, C#, Python and PHP amongst others). If you have attempted the kata then I encourage you to share your code for some variety. Adapt the code using one or more of the following scenarios:

  1. The code is used in a neat widget in an unspecified number of ways. You’ve been tasked with making the code extensible and adaptable to change. Refactor an existing code to achieve the goal.
  2. Adapt the algorithm employed in the existing code to perform ‘better’ in terms of time and/or space. How will you measure this? Can you cache results to improve anagram generation time for subsequent requests of identical input?
  3. If your acquired code has no formal testing applied to it, how can you be sure that it works? Create a suite of tests. What tests are required to assure required functionality in any dictionary?

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August 2012 – Kata: Anagrams

August 30, 2012 Agile / Kata / Meeting
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Date: Thursday 30th August 2012

Time: 19:30 start.

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Maps

Bring your laptops and your favourite coding tools! This week shall do some coding.
I am going to use another kata from Dave Thomas’ Blog; Anagrams!

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July 2012 – Refactoring Session

July 22, 2012 Agile / Meeting / Software Craftsmanship
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Courtesy of the daily WTF


Date: Thursday 26th July 2012

Time: 7:30pm start

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Maps

Refactoring Session

During July’s meeting of Agile Staffs the plan is to have a refactoring session.  The purpose of the session is to get everyone to take part in an exercise of refactoring some simple code as a means of encouraging discussion about the process and the many ways that we can go about it.

Everyone participating in the exercise will be starting from the same basic code base and may refactor it in any way that they please to improve the code.  There are some simple acceptance tests that verify the code is doing what it should.  Aside from that everyone may work on the code however they see fit.  The exception to this rule being the acceptance tests cannot be changed as they govern that everyone’s source code will still solve the same basic problem.

We have a couple of options for how the evening could be run, and I would welcome feedback as to what you think you would prefer.

Initially, everyone pairs off with a programming partner and begins to refactor the sample code, refactoring goes on for approx. 40 minutes, after which we all break for a discussion, where each pair takes a turn to describe how they have refactored the code.

From there we have a couple of options, assuming there is some time left.  We could either; continue with the refactoring from where we left off or, reset the virtual machines back to their initial state, select new programming partners and start the exercise again (as per the code retreat process).

The Environment

To make sure that everyone is using the same environment and starting from the same point, an Ubuntu Virtual Box Instance is available that contains an install of IntelliJ, Git and the proposed exercise ready to go.  Each participant will need a copy of Virtual Box and the Virtual Machine that is available via Dropbox.  The download is almost 7Gigs in size, so I will also bring copies of both the Virtual Box installs and the VM on the night but the process would be sped up greatly if everyone was prepared beforehand.

It is possible to download the image, spin it up in Virtual box to the login screen for Ubuntu to make sure it works and I would recommend that people do this so that on the night they can simply get the password and crack on.

Links to downloads:

Virtual Box:

https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

The Ubuntu Image and Instructions:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/yn1d7l1z3uk366u/JJBB0VRx_l

The Exercise

I am going to keep the exercise itself as my little secret for now.  I was going to make something up, however a quick Google search turned up an exercise for which, the initial source, an ideal final source and acceptance tests are available so I have opted to go with this instead.  Firstly, because it was there and saved me from having to worry too much about providing something that was too complicated or too simple for two 40 minute sessions and secondly because it has an ideal solution that I will hold back until much later in the session as a kind of yard stick to see how we all did.

Anyway, the aim of the session is to have a little fun, have a lot of discussion and hopefully learn some stuff as we go.

In the meantime, if anyone has any issues getting setup or queries about the session, please email me at Robert@stothard.me.uk and I will try my best to help out.

 

In the meantime, below are some further links for information about in case anyone would like to brush up beforehand.

http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Stop-Refactoring

http://lostechies.com/seanchambers/2009/10/20/31-days-of-refactoring-ebook/

http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Refactoring_Workbook.html

 

See you there

 

Bob

May 2012 – CRC Cards

May 22, 2012 Agile
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Details 

CRC Card

Date: Monday 28th May 2012

Time: 7:45pm start (Slightly later than usual)

Venue: The Stafford Ale House
Location: Google Maps

Theme: Practical Session

 

The Homecoming!

Please note the new (old) venue. I’m pleased to announce that the Stafford Ale House is the new venue (ex Pie and Ale House). Same place – with much the same staff I believe.

This is a result as the facilities are much more suitable for our needs – certainly for workshop style meetings such as this months.

CRC Cards

This month we have a guest speaker, Sam Wessel. Sam is a founder member of our group, an ex Codeweaver and now is working in Nottingham for Esendex Ltd. He has presented at conferences such as the Scottish Ruby Conference , Agile North and is also actively involved with GeekUp Nottingham.

Sam will be leading a workshop style session providing a practical introduction into CRC cards.

Wikipedia states:

Class Responsibility Collaboration (CRC) cards are a brainstorming tool used in the design of object-oriented software. They were proposed by Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. They are typically used when first determining which classes are needed and how they will interact.

My perspective is that the CRC technique can be incredibly useful on a number of counts:

  • Assists and reveals an OO design
  • Provides the team with a common understanding of the design and behaviour of a system
  • Can be useful as an OO teaching tool
  • Can be particularly useful for Visual Thinkers

All you need is a pen – there will be no coding. However I bet a number of us will want to code the designs we come up with!

Hope to see you there,
Neil Kidd

 

March 2012 – Backbone.js

March 18, 2012 Agile / Meeting
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Details

Backbone by Paul Garland, on Flickr

Date: Monday 26th March 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

 

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our second meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

At last months meeting, we sampled a selection of the menu and found it to be delicious and excellent value. The beer was pretty good too.

Backbone.js

In the modern web, great usabilty is vital. I believe Ed Yourdon (@yourdon) recently suggested that User Experience is as important a differentiator between websites / services as Transactions Per Minute was in the 90s.

Users are getting more sophisticated and more demanding. Web developers are embracing and pushing the boundaries of client side scripting to:

  • improve responsiveness
  • increase scalability
  • enable great user experiences

This has provided difficulties in the past, Javascript has had it’s challenges – accessibility, performance, cross browser issues and lack of suggested architectures. There have been some great libraries (Prototype, jQuery) to address some of these concerns. I’ve still struggled with how to apply consistent structure to Javascript heavy applications.

Several months ago, I watched Single Page Apps and the Future of History by Michael Mahemoff. It’s a great intro to the subject of Javascript centred web applications and the idea of client side templates, hashbang uri’s and frameworks like Backbone.js.

In this practical exercise I will introduce Backbone.js using underscore templates. Some Javascript knowledge is assumed but we can pair up accordingly. Also, please bring laptops with your favourite Javascript/html/text editor. I’ll be uploading the exercise to GitHub later this week, but will also bring the exercise on a memory stick.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Paul Williams

 

February 2012 – Coding Golf

February 27, 2012 Agile / Meeting
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Details 

Golf Balls

Golf Balls by walknboston

Date: Tuesday 28th February 2012

Time: 7:15pm start to 9:15pm .

Location: http://themorrismanpub.co.uk
Google Maps: http://g.co/maps/ptzt5

Theme: Practical Session

New Venue

Please note the new venue. It’s our first meeting at The Morrisman. Follow the links above for further information.

When I called in, the menu and food being served looked excellent. The beer was pretty good too.

Coding Golf

Shaun Finglas has kindly offered to run this months session. His proposal email was as follows:

My proposal is simply Code Golf. We’ll spend an hour (ish) solving a fairly trivial problem in the style of a kata as normal. The twist is you must then refactor your code to an extreme level so that you can solve the problem in the least amount of characters possible.

Rules:
– The code must compile/execute
– You can use any language you want as long as you can accept user input/display output – think simple console application
– The code must implement the required functionality

The challenge will be revealed on the night so there is no prerequisites apart from laptops. The more laptops we have the better. People can work solo/pair if they want but as long as we have enough machines we should be fine.

“Golfing” real life production code is not something you would want to do, but I’ve found Code Golf challenges very fun, and they show just what sort of merciless refactoring you can do once you have a good suite of tests to back you up. These sort of challenges are incredibly hard without a good suite of tests, so you can often win over people who maybe do not see the value in unit testing production code.

Lightning Talks

As yet (usual!) their are no volunteers for a lightning talk. If you have any topic you’d like to share with the group then you can have a 10 minute slot at the beginning of the meeting. Please email the group or mention it at the venue before we start.

Hope to see you there,
Neil Kidd

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