May 10 2010
Here are the slides from my presentation I gave at Better Software 2010: a humble attempt to spread the Software Craftsmanship philosophy among developers and managers.
Apr 02 2010
Spring is almost arriving and it’s time for another Xpug Milano meeting in coding dojo format.
This month we practiced with ObjectiveC; I gave an introductory presentation about the language, the ide and the framework, then we faced up to a nice Kata I proposed, inspired by some work of Brett Schuchert: the KataRpnCalculator.
I admit I’m amazingly surprised by how quick the Xpuggers learned the basic of the language and how good is the code they produced: awesome!
It’s the proof that it’s always a people problem not a technologic problem, and people with the right attitude can produce very good code, even though they don’t know very well the language.
Mar 01 2010
Better Software is a quite new IT Conference, mainly addressed to non technologic parts of making software.
This year I’ll give a speech about passion, enthusiam and pride to be a developer, and the how that can be used by the companies to make a lot of money 
. See you there!
Dec 23 2009
As said before, last week at Milan Xpug meeting, we organized a kata evening, with the same challenge done with different language.
During the practice to reach a quite well solution, I publicized my attempts through Twiiter gaining attention from Corey Haines hinself who asked me if I was interested to appear on katakasts.com as a guest: wow, I felt like a teenage U2 fan who, while playing in garage, receive a call from The Edge asked him if interest to play some concerts with them!
Anyway, I tried to record a good enough kata, that means without compilation error, in resonable time and typed in smooth way.
That could sound as a straightforward thing to do (I thought it that way), but I invite everyone tho give it a try: I did almost 10 complete recording, not counting all false starts or big mistakes near the end of kata.
I noticed how often I did errors in first steps, I think while I’m not into the “flow”, or at the end, when I start to relax.
Anyway, the only way to perform a Kata in a acceptable time for katakasts.com (less than 15 minutes) is to master the editor of choice.
I use vim for kata, but I’m far to be ‘fluent’ on it! Anyway, to save precious time, I learned a few usefu thricks.
First of all, we need to forget to navigate the text throught 'hjkl' or arrows keys, and use the line numbers features of vim.
With this command:
:set number
every line will appear with its number.
Almost every command of vim should be applied to a range of rows.
For example with this:
:20,30 co 35
we copy the block from line 20 to line 30 to line 35.
Or with this:
:20,30s/java/scala/g
we change word java with scala in previous code.
A little variant is
:20,30 co .
that copies the block at the current cursor position.
Anyway, you can enjoy these and other basic vim tricks in my Katacast:
KataCast: StringCalculator in Scala from giordano scalzo on Vimeo.
Dec 04 2009
Last evening, I gave a speech about Bdd, at the wonderful Milan XPUg.
The meeting has been very pleasant: I believe the members are among the most brilliant mind I know.
I could admit I didn’t know very well Bdd, but following the good old advice “teach to learn“, I got a triple win:
I taught something new to Xpug guys, I learned a lot of new things and I improved my presentation skill.
Moreover, after a couple of hours after I put online my slides, the Slideshare team promoted my presentation in home page as features presentation: what a great result for a weekend presentation hack!
Nov 18 2009
It’s near the end of November, it’s Italian Agile Day time.
As each year, it’s the time to gather all Italian Agile Practitioners, or wannabe-Agile, for a community day.
The site is the nice Hotel Savoia Regency in Bologna.
As usual, the timetable is very interesting, and I still haven’t decided what conferences attend: I’ll float around and I’ll make gut decisions.
See you, there!
Nov 10 2009
Last week I realized I needed some personal business cards; so I decided to design something different to be printed by Moo.
And yesterday they arrived.
They are very simple: in front, my name, blog and email addresses, the ideogram for “kaizen” (continuous improvement), and a Turkish proverb I like very much “No matter how far you have gone on the wrong road, turn back”; in back a Google-like page with others web places I live.
They lack my telephone number, in part because I own only work telephone and those business cards are about the “other” me, and in part because I feel telephone so ’90s
What do you think? Do you like the layout?
Nov 04 2009
At the end I upgraded my Ipod touch so I can use Wordpress for Iphone. It’s quite usable, but of course with a real keyboar the experience is really more powerful.
Oct 23 2009
A friend of mine pointed out this site celebrating the Caps Lock Day.
It happens I really don’t like Caps lock: often pressing tab I enable the caps lock, screwing up my writings, passwords, etc.
In good old days when I was a full time programmer on Unix, I used to remove that key; in the name of those glorious days this is my keyboard today:
If you prefere something less radical, CapsLockBeGone that produces the same effect.
