Flyer for Baskerville, a project management and consulting company from San Francisco, CA.

I just attended my first RoR meetup yesterday where Sarah Allen gave an awesome presentation on teaching programming languages via Test Driven Development. It’s a fundamental shift in how to approach learning a new language, and one I am adopting to learn Ruby. But even more importantly, it’s changed the way I will do development from now on.

Prior to deployment, the typical development process ends with testing. TDD does the opposite; it essentially puts testing up front making it more like a highly focused part of planning. You setup all of your tests first (ostensibly you’re doing this in a modular approach), ensure they all fail, then implement only the code needed to make each test pass, and no more. Doing it this way makes sure you have valid working tests but it’ll also keep your code lean. While more work upfront, TDD improves reliability and makes maintenance/updates far easier.

No, it’s not a new curse word… it’s a blackberry ssh client… and it’s way cool. I’ve been tooling around in our server all morning. Here’s a pic of me using my favorite editor, VIM, to modify one of the files on the server:

If you’ve got a bb, you gotta get this app. It’s from software developer Marc Paradise, and you can get it here. Kudos Marc! Great app!

We saw this while taking Oscar for his walk

Here is one of the marks we did for LG Realty, a Californian real estate company owned by Lena Griffin. We did some brainstorming and found out that the owner’s first name meant “sunlight” in Latin. When people are looking for a house, they want a light and bright space they can relax in and really call home so we decided to use the concept of light as a representative of Lena’s company. As an additional bonus — the word “light” has L and G in it. Kinda cool!