Darkness Warshed Over the Dude

We moved into our new office this week. It is really nice inside – very professional. I got to construct a cabinet from IKEA and I thought my head was going to explode. There were points in the instruction booklet where instead of describing something, there would be an arrow and the noise some action would make like “snap!”. I have never seen modular furniture that was so – modular. We are finally setup at the new place, and the overhead lighting is making everyone hate the stupid high-gloss iMac screens. Someone made the comment that it was “like being stabbed repeatedly in the eyes”, and another “could count the hairs on his face”. Now that we have more space, I will be getting a second monitor which I know will be much less frustrating. Along with our move is the mandatory male interior decorator that is stylishly unshaven, wearing a sweater under a brown corduroy jacket, and designer jeans. He was walking around the room talking about how “powerful” the color scheme felt. At least we got some new chairs out of it.

I finally got to the Registry of Motor Vehicles this week after dropping Kristin off at the airport to go back to Atlanta. Of course her being gone threw me out of my barely comfortable routine. The RMV made me surrender my Georgia license without giving me a Massachusetts license. Go figure. So with Kristin gone, the beer gone, and me without a license for the last week I think I went a little crazy. Now that Kristin is back, I asked her to do a beer run with my sad “help me” eyes. No license yet.

I figured I could go park the car at the train station this week, and ride in as usual. Kristin usually drops me off in front, so it shouldn’t have been that different. I got there around 9am the first day I tried it and the damn lot was full. I thought I was going to be clever and drive a block and park in another parking lot and walk back to the station. Apparently everyone tries that because the signs all said “T station parking illegal. Vehicle will be towed at owner’s expense”. The last thing I needed was a pending accident investigation, no license, and a towed car. I ended up just driving in the whole way which I have come to increasingly dislike. The rest of the week worked out better. I just got there earlier and the lot had spaces. The office is right across the street from the train station, so without the bus, it takes about 45 minutes to get to work from the house.

Work has been a mixed bag. Some days I really feel independent enough to feel like I am churning out good, usable code. Other days it is a lot of waiting, or some silly thing that I get hung up on for hours. We moved our project through my first “iteration”. Development on this project is done through “User stories”. A user story (either real, or fictitious) outlines what is a problem, and what needs to be changed to resolve it. A developer can read the user story, make the revisions to the code, and then write a “feature” that demonstrates that it is resolved. The cool thing about features is that it is all natural language thanks to Cucumber. For example,

  Scenario: Search by title
    Given that I am a common user
    And I have a topic with a "title" of "test topic"
    And I am on the Topic Search page
    And I search for "test"
    Then I should see "Results"
    And I should see the topic "test topic"

You can see that it is very easy to follow, and it allows our limited-technical people to read User Stories features without worrying about understanding Ruby tests.  Also, making a change, then seeing your entire test suite pass is a very reassuring feeling. Testing is so important here, that we actually write the feature first, and then change the code to make it pass.

It has been quite a bit to adjust to. I haven’t really had the opportunity to do Ruby development full time, and I am unfamiliar with Git, and OS X. I have already gone through the O’Reilly book on Git with my time on the train, and I am a few chapters into the Ruby 1.8 Pickaxe book. Textmate has been decent, and I could get used to it, however it definitely lacks some of the things Rubymine has. I do like the speed and lightness of Textmate. Case in point is when switching a branch in Git, it applies a bunch of deltas to files in your path, and Textmate just detects that files have changed and reloads them in your tabs. I anticipate that Rubymine would shit bricks and try to re-index your project. Rubymine has some impressive features for speeding up Cucumber development, and showing code coverage though, so I may use it yet again. My co-workers have all been very supportive of me using the tools that I am most comfortable with.

I am getting adjusted to life is adjusting here, but I miss everyone very much. My weekends are just a lot of downtime, with Kristin at work, and me trying to occupy my time. I’ll try and get out of my funk today with a car wash, and a haircut. Hope everyone is having fun down in the Atl!