SQL Views: quick fixes and complementary ORM

Generally people like to blog about really slick new technologies or smarty-pants ideas they have recently come up with. You don't get too many technology blogs where someone starts off with "I did this totally lame hack today..." That is why I had to come up with these introductory sentences. I had to get comfortable with the idea of sharing a real quick-fix, crappity-crap hack I did today. In my defense this lame hack was the right thing to do, and I promise to eventually right this wrong. Well, enough dancing, on with the details.

April's CHIRB: Andy Lester's "Preventing Crisis" Project Management talk

The Chicago Ruby User Group met yesterday, and Andy Lester gave a talk about a lightweight project management methodology and technical debt. You can find the slides from his power point presentation here.

Scriptaculous Effects using innerHtml vs. DOM methods

Help! I've solved a problem without successfully understanding what caused it. I'm posting this because maybe it will help somebody else, and perhaps somebody can tell me why it happens in the first place.

PROBLEM: Using innerHtml to add a textbox to an array of textboxes causes the contents of textboxes to be blanked out. It also means I cannot queue scriptaculous effects for displaying the textboxes, instead the effects execute in parallel. Here is the Javascript:

function newTextBox() {

    count+=1;

    new_companies.innerHTML+="<div id=new_company"+count+" class=new_company style={display:none} ><input type=text id=company["+count+"] name=company["+count+"] size=30 />";

    new Effect.SlideDown("new_company"+count, { queue:'end'});

}

ThoughtWorks at NSBE

Last week I was at the National Society of Black Engineers Conference career fair looking for new recruits. Many of the larger companies there put on impressive displays. Boeing had a flight simulator. Honda brought in cars and engines that were cut in half. Harley Davidson gave out leather jackets. Compared to these displays the ThoughtWorks booth was positively spartan. But what we lacked in bombastic visuals we made up for with actual content. Andy Slocum had the brilliant idea of running a mini agile project at the conference. We came up with a concept application that made conference attendees the customer, put up a story wall, and used my laptop to develop and demonstrate the app. Over the 2 days of the career fair we wrote stories, pair programmed and demonstrated agile to dozens of students. The application was our central prop for explaining what we do at ThoughtWorks. Many of the students we talked to became very interested in Agile, XP, and Ruby on Rails. We even had a few volunteers write stories and pair with us on the code!