David breaks into Agile 2011 and we manage to record a show with Michael Feathers – Chief Scientist @ Obtiva, “Working Effectively with Legacy Code” author, and just a guy who thought he was going to write a book so people would solve the problems themselves. Instead they all wanted him to work for them.

Michael talks to us about refactoring in the fourth dimension and scaling humans, a few topics that have been on his mind at Agile 2011. He wants to know what we can learn about how software teams work and how a code base got to be a certain way by analzying version control history.

What are the universal truths of software development? There may not be many, but Dave explains why you should never buy software written on a Thursday.

Assorted topics for your ADDed pleasure:

• economics vs emotions in your choice of technical practices
• how monkey-patching freezes a software system in time
• the code ecosystem
• seducing end-users!
• when you just need to take the code out back and shoot it
• what has and hasn’t changed in software in the past decade

Michael is currently working on a new book called “Brutal Refactoring,” and has published a few articles that we talked about in this episode:

• Discovering hidden design
• Refactoring deeply nested code

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:15 — 60.9MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 53:15 — 223.2MB)

In this latest ADDcast, I (Pat) sit down with JB Rainsberger at his home in Prince Edward Island, Canada. We riff on productivity, financial independence, and lifestyle design. JB describes himself as “retired, but not rich.” Among the insights he shares in this episode:

• How to truly know that you’re getting better at something
• The formula for creating positive change
• How to get into Flow in three minutes
• Focusing your energy on the things you value most
• How to protect your time

Awesome quote: “The ultimate delegation is to /dev/null – it has infinite capacity and zero interference.”

Mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, driving a tank over an illegally-parked Mercedes.

If you like what you hear in this episode, JB runs a workshop called Free Your Mind To Do Great Work where he goes into all of these topics in great detail.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:34 — 61.9MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:34 — 1.1GB)

It’s our dozenth ADDcast! Avdi Grimm dials in via the Windows virtual machine on his Linux box, making for a nifty stop motion animation effect. Avdi is a busy guy, juggling a consulting business, the conference circuit, and his recently released ebook entitled Exceptional Ruby. He shares his thoughts on how to be a good teammate and facilitator on a remote team, how he managed to write a book and still feed his four kids, and sets the record straight on the Law of Demeter. Dave uses code examples that might land him a coffee date with some FBI agents and demystifies chained enumerations. We also talk about when to refactor and how far to go, and wrap up with a quick discussion on becoming a better programmer (or anything, really) through experimentation and self-reflection.

(and no, Pat has no idea how to make the video file sizes smaller. Sorry about that)

Show notes!

• Avdi’s Confident Code talk
• Avdi’s book, Exceptional Ruby
• Avdi’s Law of Demeter blog post
• xmpfilter – a tool for annotating text files with the results of embedded ruby code
• emacs org-mode – book publishing tool and all-around life wrangler

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:04 — 59.6MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:04 — 692.7MB)

Evan Light joins us in the 11th episode of ADDcasts. We kick off the show with a discussion about TDD, where Evan tells us that TDD is more than about testing, code quality, and design. He shares some tips on how to use TDD for requirements gathering and analysis. Then, Evan being the freelancing conversation magnet that he is, we turn to the question of how to make sure you get paid for the work that you do. Along the way, Dave rewrites Pat’s lame joke, Evan makes hilarious faces, and we peer into the minds of cats and dogs.

Very Important Hyperlinks:
* Coulda, Evan’s Given-When-Then extension to Test::Unit. For BDDers who think Ruby is just fine, thank you very much
* Evan’s blog and twitter
* Ruby DCamp – a FREE “hippy unconference” for hackers, held in the mountains of Virginia
* Pat’s bit of code that generates an ActiveModel implementation from shoulda-style validations

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:25 — 91.2MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:06:25 — 324.2MB)

Dave is back from the dead and Pat is just regular back! And we made an episode of ADDcasts!

In this show we talk about self improvement, Dave’s Smalltalk Experiment, geeking out about music, being crazy in specific ways, and probably some other things Dave would mention here if he weren’t the specific kind of crazy that makes him end long lists with rambling passages of introspection about his list-making skills.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:02:28 — 85.8MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (505.6MB)

Dave rocks the standing desk and Pat rocks the awesome today in a mellow philosophical episode of ADDcasts that goes down smoooooth.

More show notes will be coming soon, but for now, today’s question is: what do you do to continuously improve yourself and your team?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:12 — 95.0MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (407.8MB)

Today’s ADDcast begins with this outrageous claim “C++ is the best object-oriented language ever, given its design philosophy.” and just gets weirder from there. Pat and I have both been reading Object Thinking by David West and we spend a good time chatting about object-oriented analysis, design and programming in terms of formalist philosophy. We also talk about something wonderful with a horrible name: hermeneutics. Along the way we discuss mental health, Attention Deficit Disorder (the real actual thing), and the design of beer-management systems.

Contest!

“What are the two hardest problems in computer science?” – Pat asked Dave this question, but forgot to deliver the punchline after Dave proclaimed, “Getting dates with women, and I’m going with that twice.” Leave a comment below, and we’ll send our favorite a copy of Exceptional Ruby by Avdi Grimm. The winner will be announced in the next episode.

Show Notes:

• Get your awesome MINASWAN shirt and more sweet geek gear from RubyThreads
• Here is the music box in the opening credits.
• Object Thinking by David West – Pat & David have both been reading this book, and we discuss thoughts from it at various points throughout the podcast. (20:40)
• Dave boldly stated: “C++ is the best object-oriented programming language ever, given its philosophy.” A minute later he was explaining how folks with ADD have hunting instincts in a world dominated by farming behavior. He cites ADD: A Different Perception as a useful resource for understanding ADD. (21:50)
• Driven to Distraction – The Bible of ADD books, with an important but boring section that even non-ADD folks find dry. (25:21)
• We pontificate about how Erlang’s messaging patterns are OOish in nature. Pat brings up Alan Kay’s mailing list post stating “the big idea is messaging.” (32:00)
• Streamlined Object Modeling – Pat cites this book as a good reference for collaboration patterns, and how it demonstrates the “flipped” nature of object-oriented design. (53:30)
• Dave wonders whether Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns it’s relevant today. Pat thinks it provides a straightforward, systematic approach to crafting code. (1:01:00)
• Pat points to the C2 wiki page on Defensive Programming during a discussion on validating data. (1:02:15)
• Avdi Grimm’s “Confident Code” talk, and his new book, Exceptional Ruby (1:02:30).

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:05:29 — 89.9MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (421.7MB)

Dave and Pat are back with another grab-bag of ADDcast pleasure. This episode was recorded on Saturday, May 21, 2011, right in the middle of the Rapture! (Caveat: we don’t really talk about the rapture that much. Or at all, really. Except for at the end.) We talk about aliens (the extraterrestrial kind), NASA’s Gravity Probe B mission, Pat’s work with payment gateways, tips and tricks for diving into legacy codebases, working for abusive bosses (both con and pro, and Pat and Dave both share experiences where they WERE the abusive boss), communication breakdowns and using Pair Programming as the solution, the value of Metaphor in communication, Dave’s (in)famous “Italian Nachos” metaphor… and the madness to his method of using it.

Show Notes and obligatory fact checking:

Dave mentions the Andromeda Galaxy and the M-31 Galaxy in the same sentence. They’re the same galaxy.

The NASA experiment Dave mentions at 6:10 is the “Gravity Probe B” experiment. NASA’s experiment announcement is here: http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2011/04may_epic/. Dave mentions at 7:50 that some of the distortion may be due to fluctuations in the Earth’s surface gravity, but this was just made up in his head. Not actual science!

Pat swears at 28:14, but our censors caught it.

Dave mentions a story about Steve Jobs and Apple in the New York Times at 52:10. This story actually appeared in Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/05/steve-jobs-magic/ Dave seriously sucks at details, huh?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:11 — 95.0MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (424.5MB)

Dave just finished writing short stories for NaShoStoMo—National Short Story Month—and during the month he discovered a large number of parallels between finding passion for writing both code and fiction. Curious? Come see Pat and Dave talk about their passion for intuitive APIs, coding in “flow”, and the importance of finishing the story you’ve led the reader to believe you started.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:09:09 — 95.0MB)

Podcast (video): Play in new window | Download (970.9MB)