It’s November, and it seems I haven’t posted anything here since January. Partly that’s because I have a Proper Job™ these days, which means I spend a lot less time writing and blogging. Partly I’ve rediscovered the joy of actually programming, which means I get to spend most of my time hacking on code.
Well, I certainly didn’t expect that kind of interest in my last post. In the past I’ve tended to have a few hundred people reading my infrequent mumblings. In the last few days nearly 20,000 people have popped by according to my site statistics, leaving nearly 150 comments. Crikey!
Software Craftsmanship risks putting the software at the centre rather than the benefit the software is supposed to deliver, mostly because we are romantics with big egos. Programming is about automating work like crunching data, processing and presenting information, or controlling and automating machines.
Last year I wrote about how we are doing planning all wrong, or rather, how we seem to focus on the wrong things when we do planning. We obsess about stories and story points and estimation, because that’s what we’ve been taught to do.
I currently have a backlog of about 15 blog articles I am failing to finish. The most embarrassingly laggy one dates from around the end of 2007. Now I know I’m a slacker.
However, others have been far more industrious than me.
There’s a one day domain-driven design event happening at SkillsMatter this Friday, 19 June in London. I’m not speaking this time so I get to sit back and enjoy some talented folks talking about really applying DDD rather than just theoretical stuff.
It’s finally happening - I’m writing a book! Well ok, the remarkable David Chelimsky is writing a book. It’s called Behaviour Driven Development with RSpec, Cucumber and Friends and myself and a few other folks are contributing in varying degrees.
…or why Mockito is my new friend.
Back in 2003 I started work on a framework called JBehave. It was an experiment to see what JUnit might have looked like if it had been designed from the ground up for TDD rather than as a unit testing framework. I was also starting to use the phrase “behaviour-driven development” to describe what I meant. The jbehave.org domain was registered and the first lines of code written on Christmas Eve 2003, much to my wife’s bemusement. Over time JBehave grew a much more interesting aspect in the form of a framework for defining and running scenarios, or automated acceptance tests.
So it’s that time of year again. I’ve got a number of conferences and workshops coming up, ranging over all sorts of topics. I just popped over to Martin Fowler’s site (I’m doing a talk with him this week) and noticed that he has a much more organized setup than me. All his events are in a sidebar and there is a handy link if you want more details. Another idea to go on my to-do pile.