I first heard about Multimethods from fellow-ThoughtWorker Unmesh Joshi. I was complaining about why Java behaves a certain way to which his response was something like "It's related to multimethods". He kind of left it at that, and so did I.

Of late, I've started looking at Clojure and surprisingly I ran into the concept of multimethods again. This time around I dug deeper. The following is how I finally understood multimethods...

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Update: 1 Aug 2010

Agile NCR 2010 was a good experience. The session I co-presented with Pk was well-attended, and by what I heard from attendees later, was well-received too. I'm glad that folks appreciated our effort in showcasing Agile buzzwords in action (ie, via photographs of our team which Pk took) rather than delving into vague and ambiguous definitions.

The presentation can be found here (do go through the slide notes): http://www.slideshare.net/amanking/agile-buzzwords-in-action

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Being on a project where the client uses Atlassian Bamboo for Continuous Integration, we could not find a monitoring tool that worked for us (some options are mentioned here).

Enter to_cctray: a Ruby app that parses RSS feeds of Bamboo builds and converts build status information into CruiseControl's CCTray XML format, enabling CruiseControl monitoring tools to be used (as long as they understand cctray.xml)

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The first RubyConf in India was a great success. I'm glad that I got an opportunity to speak there.

The talk I gave was on Ruby OOP: Objects over Classes. The role of objects and classes in object-oriented programming is something that I have been seriously revisiting for the past several months (having spent time in Java projects and Ruby projects in ThoughtWorks): this is after having done more than 4 years of Ruby programming overall. For me, the beauty of Ruby is that after a while, when you've gotten a decent grip on the language, it wanders your mind through thoughts about what programming is and what it should be about.

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Benchmarkable is a module that allows a class to mention which instance methods to benchmark, and then allows retrieving the benchmark report in csv format from the class's instances. The csv includes the method invocation timestamp, some context description (if provided), the method name along with arguments passed for the invocation, and the number of seconds the method took to execute.

Benchmarkable is available as a gem. Simply type the following:

gem install benchmarkable

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This is the lighting talk I gave at Agile Mumbai 2010 inspired by my earlier thoughts on individual practices in team setting:

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Over the years, as programmers we pick up many programming habits: stuff we're comfortable applying at an individual level because it works for us. But put in an Agile setting with pair rotation, collective ownership, etc, some of these habits break down or need more careful application.

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I attended Agile Mumbai 2010 on 16 and 17 Jan. I gave a 3-minute lightning talk and also made it till the final round of "Programming with the Stars". I also enjoyed what the keynote speakers had to say and did a good amount of networking with fellow enthusiasts.

Overall I think the event has grown over the years. I was part of Agile Mumbai 2008 where I co-presented a workshop on refactoring, and being part of the event again this year, I've noticed improvements. Having international speakers definitely upped the quality of ideas and thoughts shared, and the attendees also seemed interested in stepping beyond the initial adoption curve.

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This is a proud moment for Indian Ruby enthusiasts: India will be hosting its first RubyConf in 2010.

Check out more details at http://www.rubyconfindia.org

Speaker confirmations have begun and a good number of sessions are getting listed. Ahem, one of them happen to be mine: I'm happy to have my proposal "Ruby OOP: Objects over Classes" accepted.

(A special thanks to Sidu from ThoughtWorks Bangalore for getting this event going.)

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As part of a session I presented at Ruby FunDay in ThoughtWorks Pune, I tried TDDing a simple rock-paper-scissors game. The frameworks I compared were rspec, expectations, and good ol' test/unit.

I'm hosting the code at bitbucket for reference sake: http://bitbucket.org/amanking/ruby-test-framework-comparison

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Refactoring is a practice that ThoughtWorks developers apply in their work everyday. One of the most common (and arguably, most useful) refactoring is "Rename": basically renaming a variable, a method, a class or any such code artifact to express intent more clearly, according to its evolving responsibility.

In most cases, renaming is pretty trivial, especially with the use of modern IDEs. However, renaming an ActiveRecord model in a Ruby on Rails application can turn into an extremely non-trivial task, mostly because of "convention over configuration" (not that I'm saying anything against it). Here are the things you may need to rename along with your ActiveRecord model:

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It may not be obvious, and in most cases, it may not matter but sometimes it is helpful to know that GROUP BY in MySQL does implicit ordering according to the grouped columns.

Let's take an example. Suppose we have a table like so:

mysql> SELECT * FROM users;
+----+--------+------+
| id | name   | age  |
+----+--------+------+
|  1 | donald |   27 | 
|  2 | mickey |   20 |

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ThoughtWorks recently introduced "Adaptive ALM", a suite of 3 products that facilitate application lifecycle management. ALM sounds like a traditional management term but we do it differently in ThoughtWorks, making it very flexible and effective for everyone in the team (not just managers).

I've used Mingle in all of the ThoughtWorks projects I've been on, and can assure anyone that it has worked well for us. It makes life easy for a distributed team, or even for a collocated one actually (having an online story card is helpful when you lose your physical ones).

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On 19 June 2009, ThoughtWorks successfully hosted Pune's first Ignite event.

Ignite is a platform where people from different walks of life can address a diverse crowd for just 5 minutes each, talking about something that they are passionate about and wished that society at large was listening.

Ignite Pune started as an idea pushed by Rajiv from ThoughtWorks' Bangalore office. He had helped coordinate such an event in Bangalore and thought that it was high time our Pune office did something similar too.

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Some time back (around the 2nd week of May '09) I deployed my Jirb Online web application on Google App Engine for Java (GAE/J): http://jirbonline.appspot.com

It was not as straightforward as I'd hoped but was an interesting experience that gave me some insights into dealing with GAE/J and JRuby. This is how I went about it:

Created my GAE/J account

I registered for the GAE account and got an invite for trying out GAE/J. I registered using the mobile phone option: you get a code via sms that you need to complete the process. The Vodafone network in India failed to deliver Google's sms to me but IDEA worked. I got myself: http://jirbonline.appspot.com

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There are certain programming practices that work when done at an individual level but need careful application (and probably ceremony) when working in a team.

For example, pulling out small domain classes for things like Money, Range, Link, etc is a good idea. I'm used to doing that in my day-to-day programming... problem is that my team mates have the same good habits. So after a while, you may run into more than one class representing the same thing. If a concept is tied to your project's domain, it is very likely to have an impact on various features (user stories), and hence, different team members may end up having to implement that same concept. If folks do not realize that a class for the concept is already implemented, they may accidentally add more copies of the class. In my current project, we had Link, ServiceLink, and Url almost doing the same thing until we noticed the duplication and made all consumers use just Link.

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