A fellow-ThoughtWorker, Kartik Rajan, recently recommended this Kent Beck interview: Kent Beck on Agile Adoption & Values

The interview is a bit dated, posted early 2007, but Kent's advice remains fresh and apt.

As usual, Kent Beck knows what he is talking about and succeeds in getting the message across.

What I particularly liked about his responses was that he didn't give standard answers, such as "values are more important than practices" and all that... he stuck to basics about how he goes about it himself: show respect for people you're working with, try working in their style while continuing to live your own values, principles and practices (I'm not sure how you'll deal with "conflicting" situations... but I guess if the "respect" is maintained, things will sort out), and learn from each other.

My first day in ThoughtWorks Chennai has been crazy. But also life changing.

It's a close group of talented folks focused on the project at hand without forgetting to have fun at the same time.

The office has a different sort of energy, one I'd like to see more of in the Pune office.

And yeah, the life changing part: as soon as I plugged in my laptop to the office network this morning, I realized that my laptop had been harvesting a virus that was just waiting to get onto the Net! Once unleashed, it released complete mayhem. I was gonna get a dual boot for Ubuntu along with my Windows XP installation but I've now gone for "pure linux lovin'". Let's see how the journey goes... my first time without Windows.

Forrester analyst Carey Schwaber nominatesThoughtWorks as one of the top vendors in the application development space who have made a significant impact in the field: Which Vendors Have Made A Difference In App Dev?

Currently I'm working on something that needs to recognize threads from email conversations. An easy way would be to rely on a specific token/reference being present in the Subject. However to allow users to change email subjects without losing track of the "thread", we need to rely on using email headers, specifically: message-id, in-reply-to and references.

These headers are best described in RFC 2822 (Section 3.6.4)

Hey, I just found out from fellow-ThoughtWorker Ola Bini that the creators of various Ruby implementations are having regular Ruby Design Meetings. Ola has blogged about this: Ruby Design Meeting.

You can even check out the chat meeting transcripts here: http://ruby-design.pbwiki.com/Design20080421

I hope to learn a few things by going through the transcripts. It's like being there with all these amazing folks!