A sad day

Today is a bit of a sad day for me. I deleted two comments I had on two different posts related to Ant. Some anonymous troll from coderslog.com posted comments on these two entries just to link to his web site. Beside the fact that the comments were related to Ant and Maven, they added nothing to the actual post. They were just links put there by a troll.

I do not accept trolls on my blog, period.

This is the first time I delete a comment. I hope this will be the last. I don't care if people don't have the same opinion as I comments on my blog. But people who try to get higher ranking or some publicity for they own site are off limit. If you want to link in a post to your own site, it's OK with me as long as your comment provide something meaningful to the conversation.

RE: If Agile is So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing It?

InfoQ asks "If Agile is So Good, Why Isn't Everyone Doing it?"...

Its a well know fact that most people don't like change. This is why we have change management consultants! However this doesn't really explain why people seems to resist more to agility than when we impose a heavyweight process upon them.

When we add to an existing process, people will complain about having to do more stuff. But they don't feel threatened by the new tasks they have to do. If the process becomes more heavyweight, they will just ask their manager to hire someone and after asking again and again, somebody will be hired to take the load. Manager just love this way of doing things. They can ask for more budget (which they'll get after asking a few times) and they ends up managing more money and more people. The manager just got closer to his nirvana.

Now, when we are talking about Agile Software Development, we are not talking about more, but we are talking about less. Because agility is about being more efficient, we need less people, less time and less budget to achieve the same result. If we think rationally, then we feel good about this. However most people don't think rationally. Because we have a smaller and multi-disciplinary team, some people will fear to loose their job because there is less work. Some people will fear that they'll be less relevant. Some will not want to take new roles or change their existing one. Managers will fear that their budget or workforce will be lowered...

But it does not have to be this way... Being more efficient is not about firing employee or decreasing budget! It's about doing more with the same workforce and budget. It's about bringing more quality. It's about having more fun doing what we do.

On a final note... More heavyweight process mean more finger pointing when things go wrong (and in last resort, the process itself gets finger pointed). More agility, means being successful as a team or failing as a team! No finger pointing required (this do not mean that we should not have a post-mortem). Even failing as a team is fun... compared to being alone getting the blame.

Beware iPhone... Here is the fxPhone!

Sun just announced the JavaFX Mobile software... This looks like cool software that promise to allow any manufacturer to produce iPhone look-alike! Let's just hope that they'll have the same multi-touch screen support and that consumer will be able to load the software they want on it!

RE: To Groovy or to JRuby

Shay Banon ask the question : To Groovy or to JRuby?
It seems that these days, whenever we see Groovy mentioned in blog post, it must be compared to Ruby or more specifically to JRuby. Then, in the comments, we have some Groovy lover express that Groovy is better than JRuby for the Java developer. What is funny is that people who are working on JRuby suggests that you try both and see for yourself.

Now that Groovy achieved to deliver a 1.0 version (and now a 1.1), it seems that this trend is increasing... Groovy advocate are becoming more vocal about their stuff. Instead of pushing Groovy/Grails for what it's worth, they are pushing it by saying how easy it is to learn compared to Ruby/Rails for a Java developer perspective. This is the argument that's being repeated over and over! And, as we see in some post comments, this makes some manager feel better.

This makes me feel sad!

Now this argument has some truth in it, but this does not necessarily make Groovy a better alternative than JRuby for scripting the Java platform. Learning a new language is always a good thing... Be it Groovy, Ruby, Python, etc. You never really loose by learning a new language... You never really loose by learning a new API, a new framework. Learning new things makes you a better programmer.

This is why I prefer Ruby/Rails than Groovy/Grails... It's not because Ruby/Rails is superior, it's just that learning a completely new language/framework help me open my mind to new ways of thinking. Learning Groovy will also do that, but to a much smaller extent. This will help me become a better programmer... Even better it will keep my mind awake enough to not become a dinosaur who know only one language/framework.

And to the manager that may read this... Having developers who have an open mind and bring new ideas is way better than having developers that will not stray away from their main comfort zone. It cost less in training and allow you to get advantage of new technologies as they become mainstream instead of missing the boat.

Don't take this post as telling you to choose JRuby, like Charles Nutter said, "don't let anyone make the choice for you."