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.

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.)

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

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:

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 |