Technorati Tags: agile, bsw2010, software craftsmanship

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.

It has been my first Barcamp, so I though it was necessary to present something, and I decided to assemble a little introduction to Tdd coding for Iphone.

Here there is the video of my presentation:

AgileCamp – iPhone agile DEV (di Giordano Scalzo) from Sketchin on Vimeo.

Technorati Tags: barcamp, bdd, iphone

Technorati Tags: conference, presentation

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.

Technorati Tags: kata, scala, vim

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!

Technorati Tags: bdd, presentation, xpug

See you, there!

Technorati Tags: agile, iad09

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?

Technorati Tags: me

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.

Technorati Tags: geek