lixo.org

After reading A Theory Of Fun, I started seeing projects (and many other human activities) modelled as a game. In the book, Raph Koster describes a series of game development rules, and I found that they can be mapped to the software development project domain with some interesting results:

• A project, just like a game, has roles. In projects, they’re specific to each role. These rules define the possible actions for each of them. (This one isn’t described in the book, but I added it just to contextualise.)
• Role-specific rules should be unambiguous, intelligible and apply to all people in that role.
• No project can be developed without the meaningful interaction of the people in all roles.
• The outcome of a project has to be uncertain, otherwise it loses its appeal.
• Rules and representation of a project are not independent but interact with each other.
• People require clear and immediate feedback to understand the relationship between action and outcome.
• People require a clear goal so they can perform meaningful actions within the project world.
• Conflict and competition against time, budget and scope are essential for everyone’s motivation.
• The challenges of a project should match the skills of the people involved: neither too easy (boring) nor too difficult (frustrating).
• Projects can be developed without the need for even skill sets among the team. Instead the people learn through interaction, and this should be allowed and encouraged to happen.
• People perform actions within the project world and observe how these actions change the state of the project.
• People form a hypothesis about the meaning of a deliverable or action on the basis of their studies.
• People recognise and learn fundamental patterns within the project and can apply these to different situations (and, of course, other projects).

The more I look at these, the more this matches the way I see people working in agile projects. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned here…

Developers in most projects I have seen try to establish some sort of convention around leaving TODOs in the code. The most common seems to be “if you see something funny, try to fix it immediately, but if it’d take too long and you’ve got something else to worry about, leave a comment next to it starting with TODO, your initials and maybe a date”.

You know what? Using comments for that is not as cool in Ruby, Python or Java, which has had static imports for a while now. How about creating a TODO method that takes in the initials, date and comment text, or whatever else you might find useful?

import static my.project.DevelopmentUtils.TODO;



...



public void doStuffThatSmellsFunny() {

   TODO("CV, 21/jan", "Clean this mess up after fixing #3849");

   ...

}

There are some advantages to this: you can actually put some code inside that method to do, say, logging. Another good thing is that now the TODOs can be tracked using the same refactoring tools and features of modern IDEs as just any other code in the project.

It may seem a bit cumbersome, but I’ve been trying that for a few days now and it feels quite pleasant to use. I got my TODO method to just spit out the message to the console so when I run tests, I can quickly get an idea of what areas of the code touch stinky or incomplete ones.

I’ve been hanging out with friends in São Paulo over the last few days, getting unreasonably drunk, eating too much and attending the Google Developer Day, not necessarily in that order, so I missed the announcements that Facebook had opened up their API.

As a software developer with a healthy affection for all things related to network effects and emergent behaviours, this is brilliant.

The applications provided get added to a central registry inside Facebook, from where you can pick and choose the ones you want added to your profile. They still have to be deployed separately (as Facebook doesn’t host them for you), but the user doesn’t see any of that – all of it is a very simple and well-designed UI, so “installing” an application to your profile is a hell of a lot easier than installing a desktop application to your machine, and gives the user instant feedback.

Leaving important considerations on data ownership and privacy aside, which I won’t comment on since I haven’t read the agreements in much detail, I can see this thing eating a huge chunk of what we nowadays use disconnected internet applications for. Instant, mobile and email-like messaging, discussion groups, photo sharing and some other basic kinds of applications are already there, as are little data aggregation tools, like the del.icio.us and Magnolia importers. If this API is successful (and so far, nothing suggests otherwise), other social networks could as well be dragged inside Facebook if they support any kind of external API. And, if not, there are always screen scraping tools like Hpricot.

Something to watch out for, definitely. Ten years ago, we were wondering what kinds of applications could be made to run on the internet. Facebook is making us wonder what kinds of applications can be made to run on top of a social network. Which ones would you try?

We’re using Oracle at my current project. I wanted to run some reporting scripts on the database to do some nice graphs with Graphviz and yEd. “Well, that’s been done before, should be pretty easy to hook up ActiveRecord to Oracle”, I thought.

It turns out that’s nearly impossible to do on an Intel Mac running the x86 version of Ruby, since the Oracle Instant Client SDK only ships with PowerPC binaries so far (hence the title). Unless you recompile your whole Ruby install to PPC, something that to me sits somewhere between unspeakable and atrocious, you can’t link to its libraries, as far as I can tell.

But you can get SQLPlus to run on Rosetta. And you can get SQLPlus to spit out reasonably parseable HTML. And it’ll run slow – but for a quick-n-dirty report that you want to generate once every couple of months or so, it’s… ok.

def select_all(sql)

  html = `echo "#{sql};" | sqlplus -r 3 -l -s -m "html on entmap on" #{@user}/#{@password}@#{@host}`

  doc = Hpricot(html)

  (doc/'tr').collect do |tr| 

    (tr/'td').collect do |td|

      td.innerText.strip if td.innerText 

    end if (tr/'td').size == (doc/'tr/th').collect do |th|

      th.innerText.strip if th.innerText

    end.uniq.size

  end.compact

end

Look what you made me do, Oracle. You should be ashamed. As you can see, though, I’m not that easily embarrassed. Some people wouldn’t ever show this code to anyone, and deny its existence at all possible cost. I think it’s worth the shock value, though.

Inspired by Nat Pryce‘s recent scrapheap challenge idea for a Name That Tune style game, and given I’ve been having so much fun with the Ruby OSA lately, I decided to implement my own solution using it to drive iTunes and I had a lot of fun in the process.

I started by grabbing a reference to iTunes:

%w(rubygems rbosa).each {|lib| require lib }



itunes = OSA.app("iTunes")

And then playing about with it until I found the right properties to look at and methods to call. As the game requires a constant stream of random tracks, I thought using the Party Shuffle feature of iTunes to would fit just right. The Party Shuffle is a special playlist that sits inside your library:

library = itunes.sources.find {|s| s.kind == OSA::ITunes::ESRC::LIBRARY }

party_shuffle = library.playlists.find {|p| p.special_kind == OSA::ITunes::ESPK::PARTY_SHUFFLE }

With that party_shuffle (an OSA::ITunes::Playlist object) at hand, it’s pretty easy to do the rest: playing, changing tracks and figuring out how to score each guess.

If you can grab the complete solution and make it into a nice little dashboard widget, I’ll be forever in debt!


BONUS UPDATE: I just finished refactoring a couple of things (namely, moving the monkey patching of OSA::ITunes away – it’s now in itunes.rb) and, in the process of doing so, Tune Fight was born!