First, this dojo reinforced some strong convictions of mine:
- practice is the essence of art. Whether you are a musician, an illustrator, a surgeon, or a sportsman, it is indeed by practicing everyday the same gestures (and by learning more of them) that you tend towards perfection.
- the best way to teach and share is to practice together, exchange views, talk about the code at hand. And do it a lot. At Eyeka’s I have practiced enough pair programming to feel the benefits of everyday technical discussions on myself (that’s how I learned Ruby & Rails from scratch) and on others (that’s when I saw good programmers become excellent ones).

I also discovered that the kata is not so much about what you do but rather about how you do it, how you present your code to others, how you explain your thought process and how you structure your ideas so they follow an intuitive flow, even for people who aren’t familiar with the concepts you’re dealing with. You surely can have a great kata on a very simple exercise.

Last but not least, I have been really impressed by Emmanuel Gaillot’s performance which undoubtfully required a fair amount of preparation and a strong concentration. The kata he chose to present — to a non Rubyist audience — was consistent and a very good example of simple and powerful Ruby code accessible to everyone.

It demonstrated the great intuitiveness of the language itself and was perfect to introduce and demonstrate the power and usefulness of Test Driven Development. For 2 hours we’ve been really doing TDD by the book (and not trying to cope with the test coverage afterwards)… And we got to see Shoes in action, Yay!

We’ll keep you posted for the next one!

Some people just never get credited for the amazing work they do. I’ve been thinking for a while now about writing a ‘thank you’ note to the people that really made my work-life smooth, easy and fun in the last 3 years.

To Benoit, Vincent, Mathieu, Didier, Mikhail, Daniel, Richard :
Thank you for your ever-positive attitude in an incredibly stressful environment
Thank you for sharing your knowledge with such generosity with me
Thank you for your unlimited coding and architecturing creativity
Thank you for your team spirit (probably the hardest thing to find in a… team!)
Thank you for always saying “hmm that’s tricky but let me check and get back to you” instead of “no that’s technically impossible” (AND getting back with a smart solution :)
Thank you for sharing your screen, keyboard and vital space :) during our pair-programming sessions

I find this quote from Mark Twain perfectly applies to you guys : “They didn’t know it was impossible, so they did it”

It’s been an incredible adventure, thank you for that, I’m not sorry it’s over, I’m just glad I was part of it.

Keep going

Here comes Rails Magazine, a newbie in the print-on-demand platform. I had already found “The Rubyist” on Magcloud, and their second issue is now available…

If you’re lucky enough to live in a country where Magcloud delivers and if you’ve read either Rails Magazine or The Rubyist, please leave a note or a comment on this post so we, europeans, can have an idea of what’s really inside! Thanks!

The Impossible Project
They have 12 months to invent a new sort of integral film for vintage Polaroid cameras. I love you guys!

The ultimate guide for everything Twitter
What a great post with tons of useful resources. Nice research work. You’ll never tweet the same way again after reading this.

Considering the hard time I had convincing my boss to set those practices up, I was thinking of “XP from the trenches” as a title for my slideshow but it might sound a bit subversive :)

Instead I will focus on what has been installed and how, what were the benefits for Eyeka, what has not been installed and why. If you’re somewhere in the west, drop by, I’ll be pleased to see you!