Behavior-based modeling is a good fit for application-level data modeling. Behaviors and their supporting nouns tend to be consistent within an application, regardless of varying ways the data may be persisted. For system or cross-application data modeling, a more abstract, noun-first (object-based) approach may be better. This way, the data structure doesn't have to change from application to application.
I'm at RailsConf.
Portland, Oregon is, well, Portland (overcast and wet). Got in late last night and walked over to Stanford's. The service was friendly, even at 10:30 PM. Everything about the burger was above average. And it came with hot, crispy, slightly salty fries. It was all devoured with sips of a local wheat bear that I forget the name of.
So far, having been away from Ruby and Rails for over a year, it feels like going back to a place you used to live. Some things are still the same. In other ways, I hardly recognize the place. New techniques like elastic computing (and plenty of competing commercial hosting options), new tools such as git, tarantula, and hobo, etc. Good stuff.
I'll pretend I blog and let you know how it all goes.
Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design (Interactive Technologies), by Bill Buxton, is an excellent read on the scope, purpose, and implementation techniques for designing good user experiences. Buxton's narrative style is easy, warm, and conveys his rich experience and passion for the subject. He includes a rich set of stories and case studies that demonstrate the importance of design and techniques for doing it.
Continue reading "Book Review: Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton" »
In SOA and Agile: Friends or Foes?, Amr Elssamadisy opens a discussion on the perceived disconnect between what should be the mutual admiration societies of SOA and Agile developers. Most of the comments to Amr's article are also informative and and well-written. However, in the discussion, not mentioned are the non-technical forces in play which, hopefully, this response can illuminate.
If you're new or semi-new to TextMate and you're collaborating with someone on the same development project, file change collisions are inevitable. Textmate has nice support for resolving file conflicts when they show up after updating to the latest SVN depot revision.
Note: This post assumes you are on a Mac :^).
Continue reading "Resolving Files with TextMate, Subversion, and FileMerge" »
Several people I know have asked me this recently. Without just pointing straight to Bruce Tate, here's what I've come up with.
<short_answer>
* Ruby is an order of magnitude more powerful and less bloated than Java
* Ruby has Rails and an explosion of new libraries being built with or for Ruby
* Ruby will make you look good to your customers by developing more efficiently, making you more money
* Ruby is hot
</short_answer>
If you you’re a Perforce customer and an Eclipse user, you should use the Perforce plugin for Eclipse. It makes the job managing check-ins and check-outs easy, allowing you to stay nearly fulltime in your environment. Unfortunately, renaming an Eclipse plugin project isn’t supported very nicely.
Continue reading "Renaming Projects with the Perforce Plug-in for Eclipse" »
The price customers pay for software and the level of usability they get with that software is inversely proportional. As long as it solves a big business problem or two, it doesn't matter how easy it is to actually use the stuff.