Posts by categories

agile

How to run your first improvement kata

3 minute read

The improvement kata can solve problems that typical retrospectives fail to address. Although there is a halo of mystery around it, it’s actually not that di...

Most Scrum teams are not agile

7 minute read

Being agile is about adapting to change and continuously improving. I’ve seen (and been) in too many teams blindly following Scrum (Scrum Zombies) without fi...

Overclocking a Scrum Team to 12

4 minute read

From Wikipedia : Overclocking is configuration of computer hardware components to operate faster than certified by the original manufacturer …

How to kill Scrum Zombies ?

3 minute read

First of all, what is that ? Usually, Scrum zombies go in groups, and quite often, you’ll find a full team of them :

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Kudo Boxes for Kids

1 minute read

How do you get your kids to participate with housekeeping ? I guess that’s the dream of all parents. As so, we’ve tried quite a lot of tactics throughout the...

Real Developers Ship

1 minute read

If you are a developer and you are not shipping, you’re in the danger zone. I believe it’s mostly your fault, and it’s time to act.

Scrum teams do not need A Scrum Master

1 minute read

We don’t have an official scrum master in our team anymore. We now have 7 ! A different team member assumes the full scrum master role at every sprint.

Recipes For An Agile Workspace

4 minute read

Nowadays, start-ups and tech companies seem to be competing for the most beautiful offices in order to attract top talents.

How To Write Good Performance Stories

2 minute read

If you’re having difficulties writing good performance related stories for your project, that’s no surprise ! We’ve been through the same troubles and we fou...

Binary Hand Planning Poker

less than 1 minute read

At work, we are using as we all have Android phones, we are using the Scrum Poker Cards app to do our planning poker.

Can agile teams commit?

3 minute read

Making commitments to deliver software is always difficult. Whatever the margin you might take, it invariably seems wrong afterward …

Performance is a feature

1 minute read

Now that is a widespread title for blog articles ! Just search Google, and you’ll find “Performance is a feature” in Coding Horror and others.

Sprints are not sprints

less than 1 minute read

I really don’t know why Scrum Sprints are called sprints ! From my experience, the number one mistake made by team starting with Scrum is to work as quickly ...

Scaling Agile

2 minute read

I have worked in small agile teams, and it does indeed work a lot better than the classical waterfall & hierarchic environment. When speaking with other ...

Collecting agile and XP best practices

less than 1 minute read

There is a huge difference between reading about agile software developpment, and being an agile developper or team. There are a lot of practical best practi...

Back to top ↑

testing

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

Flavors of TDD

3 minute read

During the years doing some coding dojos with the same circle of people, I came up with my own style of practicing TDD. Lately, I had the chance to do a pair...

How NOT to use mocks, my talk at Paris.rb

less than 1 minute read

As I already wrote about, mocks can be trecherous … I gave a talk about how to avoid them last tuesday at Paris.rb meetup. Here are the slides.

Performance is a feature

1 minute read

Now that is a widespread title for blog articles ! Just search Google, and you’ll find “Performance is a feature” in Coding Horror and others.

RSpec matchers combinators

1 minute read

Rspec matchers are a lot like predicates. Predicates that can talk … The good thing about predicates, as anybody who has done a bit of functional programming...

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Ditching autotest for guard

less than 1 minute read

I have been using autotest for 2 years, and it’s been great ! The first time I ran it I thought “This rocks !” and I have always been using it since …

If new cucumber transform breaks everyhing …

less than 1 minute read

After reading The cucumber book I decided to add clever cucumber transforms but steps started to fail all over the place … Even completly unrelated scenarios...

The poor man’s memory profiling

1 minute read

While working on www.mes-courses.fr, a background scheduled task that was running fine on heroku started to fail with out of memory errors. After searching a...

Windows licker like with C#

1 minute read

In Growing object-oriented software guided by tests they use a java library called Window Licker to pilot a gui running in test thread. Next time I started a...

stub_model and mock_model

less than 1 minute read

I decided to stop using stub_model and mock_model. I do not use them enough to get fluent with them. Every time I have to deal with them, something breaks in...

Back to top ↑

ruby

How NOT to use mocks, my talk at Paris.rb

less than 1 minute read

As I already wrote about, mocks can be trecherous … I gave a talk about how to avoid them last tuesday at Paris.rb meetup. Here are the slides.

Setting up Octopress with Vagrant and rbenv

3 minute read

I recently got hands on an abandonned laptop that was better than the one I was currently using for my personnal hackings, so I decided to switch to this one...

Online store scrapping DSL gem

1 minute read

Since I decided to stop Mes Courses to focus on AgileAvatars, I have been extracting open source gems from the code base. The last one is Storexplore : a dec...

RSpec matchers combinators

1 minute read

Rspec matchers are a lot like predicates. Predicates that can talk … The good thing about predicates, as anybody who has done a bit of functional programming...

Ruby regex captures oneliner

1 minute read

Surely this post is nothing new for experienced ruby developpers, but I found it so handy, that I thought it deserved a post of its own though. The problem i...

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Ditching autotest for guard

less than 1 minute read

I have been using autotest for 2 years, and it’s been great ! The first time I ran it I thought “This rocks !” and I have always been using it since …

If new cucumber transform breaks everyhing …

less than 1 minute read

After reading The cucumber book I decided to add clever cucumber transforms but steps started to fail all over the place … Even completly unrelated scenarios...

Rubular: a really usefull ruby regex tool

less than 1 minute read

Working with regular expressions is always a try and fail and retry … experience. It really helps to have an interactive tool with which to tune up your expr...

The poor man’s memory profiling

1 minute read

While working on www.mes-courses.fr, a background scheduled task that was running fine on heroku started to fail with out of memory errors. After searching a...

Cloning an rbenv version

less than 1 minute read

There is no doc about this, but it turns out to be very simple, just copy the version directory :

Rails autoload good practices

1 minute read

I started using rails autoload to load files in my lib folder of http://www.mes-courses.fr. Before that, I had been using hand written require statements, an...

Ruby thirdparties best practices

less than 1 minute read

I am just finishing migrating www.mes-courses.fr from rails 2 to rails 3, and I can assure that I learnt these lessons the hard way …

stub_model and mock_model

less than 1 minute read

I decided to stop using stub_model and mock_model. I do not use them enough to get fluent with them. Every time I have to deal with them, something breaks in...

Using stock ruby with rbenv

less than 1 minute read

While migrating to ruby 1.9, I started using rbenv. I was wondering how it would handle my stock ubuntu ruby 1.8. It works out of the box with the rbenv “sys...

Order of execution of before blocks in RSpec

less than 1 minute read

I discovered that before blocks in RSpec’s examples are executed in the order they are declared. There is no great deal about it, but it can be useful when u...

external gem rails generator not found

less than 1 minute read

When trying to use devise 1.0.11 with rails 2.3.8 and bundler 1.0.10, I got the error could not find generator ... when running bundle exec script/generate d...

Using gems instead of rails plugins on heroku

less than 1 minute read

Heroku is great, you can have a rails app running live in a few minutes ! There are still a few tricky points you’ve got to sort out a little differently. On...

Back to top ↑

coaching

How to kill Scrum Zombies ?

3 minute read

First of all, what is that ? Usually, Scrum zombies go in groups, and quite often, you’ll find a full team of them :

Back to top ↑

event storming

Is XP the middle child of Agile?

In this podcast, you’ll learn about eXtreme Programming. Where did it come from? What are its differences between XP and Scrum or Kanban? How things like DDD...

Back to top ↑

architecture

Back to top ↑

continuous improvement

How to run your first improvement kata

3 minute read

The improvement kata can solve problems that typical retrospectives fail to address. Although there is a halo of mystery around it, it’s actually not that di...

Most Scrum teams are not agile

7 minute read

Being agile is about adapting to change and continuously improving. I’ve seen (and been) in too many teams blindly following Scrum (Scrum Zombies) without fi...

How to get your team to do code reviews

6 minute read

As software developers, we very always often get to work in code bases that are not perfect. In this situation we have 3 choices : leave, grumble, or make so...

Motivation game

1 minute read

At MegaCorp where I am currently working, there is a small team that is dedicated to find solutions to software bugs that regularly happen in production. The...

Back to top ↑

programming

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

How to get your team to do code reviews

6 minute read

As software developers, we very always often get to work in code bases that are not perfect. In this situation we have 3 choices : leave, grumble, or make so...

Almost 15 years of using Design By Contract

6 minute read

I first read about Design By Contract in 2002, in Object Oriented Software Construction 2. As soon as I read it, I was convinced, today, I still believe it’s...

Developer ! Are you losing your rat race ?

4 minute read

A rat race is an endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. It conjures up the image of the futile efforts of a lab rat trying to escape while running...

Flavors of TDD

3 minute read

During the years doing some coding dojos with the same circle of people, I came up with my own style of practicing TDD. Lately, I had the chance to do a pair...

The Size Of Code

2 minute read

The CFO’s debt is visible in his balance sheet. The CTO’s technical debt is invisible. What about making it visible ?

Anti Ugly-Code Glasses

less than 1 minute read

I think I found a way to fix the dirty code problem once and for all …

How To Keep Up With Software Technologies

3 minute read

Since I started to program professionally 15 years ago, a lot of things have changes. A lot of technologies appeared and became mainstream while others fell ...

Back to top ↑

tdd

Does Programming equal Refactoring?

1 minute read

This infographics presents how TCR increases the share of refactoring in TDD. But Refactoring is already most of our daily work! We’d better learn it serious...

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

Coding Dojo Troubleshooting

3 minute read

In my last 2 blog posts, I’ve detailed why and how to start a team Randori Coding Dojo. That’s the easy part. As soon as you start your first dojo, you’ll fa...

Flavors of TDD

3 minute read

During the years doing some coding dojos with the same circle of people, I came up with my own style of practicing TDD. Lately, I had the chance to do a pair...

Back to top ↑

refactoring

Does Programming equal Refactoring?

1 minute read

This infographics presents how TCR increases the share of refactoring in TDD. But Refactoring is already most of our daily work! We’d better learn it serious...

Is XP the middle child of Agile?

In this podcast, you’ll learn about eXtreme Programming. Where did it come from? What are its differences between XP and Scrum or Kanban? How things like DDD...

Refactoring trick to insert a wrapper

1 minute read

Last week at work, we decided that we needed an Anticorruption Layer between our code and another team’s. They have been using our internal data structures a...

Back to top ↑

lean

Too busy to prioritize?

less than 1 minute read

This infographic presents how the lack of prioritization triggers a vicious circle of bloated organizations, late deliveries, and a non-sustainable pace

How to run your first improvement kata

3 minute read

The improvement kata can solve problems that typical retrospectives fail to address. Although there is a halo of mystery around it, it’s actually not that di...

Recipes For An Agile Workspace

4 minute read

Nowadays, start-ups and tech companies seem to be competing for the most beautiful offices in order to attract top talents.

Silosis

less than 1 minute read

I just invented the word, I found it funny :

Scaling Agile

2 minute read

I have worked in small agile teams, and it does indeed work a lot better than the classical waterfall & hierarchic environment. When speaking with other ...

Back to top ↑

remote

TO DO list or Mind Map for programming

5 minute read

Maintaining a TO DO list or a Mind Map for programming task has many benefits. It improves collaboration, our decisions and our vision of what’s left to do.

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Back to top ↑

software

13 Tricks for Successful Side Projects

8 minute read

As I said last week, I released the v0.1 of Philou’s Planning Poker, my latest side project. Although I have a day job, a wife, a family and a mortgage to pa...

Side Projects Matter

6 minute read

As a manager, you could benefit a lot from helping your developers with their side projects.

Developer ! Are you losing your rat race ?

4 minute read

A rat race is an endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. It conjures up the image of the futile efforts of a lab rat trying to escape while running...

Overclocking a Scrum Team to 12

4 minute read

From Wikipedia : Overclocking is configuration of computer hardware components to operate faster than certified by the original manufacturer …

5 Years of Blogging About Software

3 minute read

5 years ago, I started blogging. I started really casually, my posts were personal reminders and notes rather than real well thought of articles. Nevertheles...

Real Developers Ship

1 minute read

If you are a developer and you are not shipping, you’re in the danger zone. I believe it’s mostly your fault, and it’s time to act.

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Back to top ↑

ddd

Is XP the middle child of Agile?

In this podcast, you’ll learn about eXtreme Programming. Where did it come from? What are its differences between XP and Scrum or Kanban? How things like DDD...

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

Almost 15 years of using Design By Contract

6 minute read

I first read about Design By Contract in 2002, in Object Oriented Software Construction 2. As soon as I read it, I was convinced, today, I still believe it’s...

Back to top ↑

extreme programming

Is XP the middle child of Agile?

In this podcast, you’ll learn about eXtreme Programming. Where did it come from? What are its differences between XP and Scrum or Kanban? How things like DDD...

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Scaling Agile

2 minute read

I have worked in small agile teams, and it does indeed work a lot better than the classical waterfall & hierarchic environment. When speaking with other ...

Collecting agile and XP best practices

less than 1 minute read

There is a huge difference between reading about agile software developpment, and being an agile developper or team. There are a lot of practical best practi...

Back to top ↑

squash-BDUF-with-event-storming-series

Back to top ↑

pair programming

TO DO list or Mind Map for programming

5 minute read

Maintaining a TO DO list or a Mind Map for programming task has many benefits. It improves collaboration, our decisions and our vision of what’s left to do.

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Back to top ↑

rails

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Rails autoload good practices

1 minute read

I started using rails autoload to load files in my lib folder of http://www.mes-courses.fr. Before that, I had been using hand written require statements, an...

Devise, SSL requirements and post data

less than 1 minute read

I am using rails 2.3.8, devise 1.0.11 and ssl_requirements 0.1.0. I am having strange behaviour when mixing devise with ssl_requirements. When a form posts t...

external gem rails generator not found

less than 1 minute read

When trying to use devise 1.0.11 with rails 2.3.8 and bundler 1.0.10, I got the error could not find generator ... when running bundle exec script/generate d...

Back to top ↑

team building

Coding Dojo Troubleshooting

3 minute read

In my last 2 blog posts, I’ve detailed why and how to start a team Randori Coding Dojo. That’s the easy part. As soon as you start your first dojo, you’ll fa...

Recipes For An Agile Workspace

4 minute read

Nowadays, start-ups and tech companies seem to be competing for the most beautiful offices in order to attract top talents.

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Back to top ↑

personal-productivity

TO DO list or Mind Map for programming

5 minute read

Maintaining a TO DO list or a Mind Map for programming task has many benefits. It improves collaboration, our decisions and our vision of what’s left to do.

Vertical Kanban Board Setups

4 minute read

Turning Kanban boards vertically fits western cultures better. Improving UX of our process tools would eventually lead to a more effective and sustainable pa...

13 Tricks for Successful Side Projects

8 minute read

As I said last week, I released the v0.1 of Philou’s Planning Poker, my latest side project. Although I have a day job, a wife, a family and a mortgage to pa...

My Ultimate Jira Personal Kanban

5 minute read

A few years ago, I wrote about how I started to use Jira as my personal Kanban board at work. A lot of things have changed since then, which brought me to up...

Back to top ↑

technical debt

The Size Of Code

2 minute read

The CFO’s debt is visible in his balance sheet. The CTO’s technical debt is invisible. What about making it visible ?

Anti Ugly-Code Glasses

less than 1 minute read

I think I found a way to fix the dirty code problem once and for all …

Back to top ↑

coding dojo

Coding Dojo Troubleshooting

3 minute read

In my last 2 blog posts, I’ve detailed why and how to start a team Randori Coding Dojo. That’s the easy part. As soon as you start your first dojo, you’ll fa...

Back to top ↑

rspec

RSpec matchers combinators

1 minute read

Rspec matchers are a lot like predicates. Predicates that can talk … The good thing about predicates, as anybody who has done a bit of functional programming...

stub_model and mock_model

less than 1 minute read

I decided to stop using stub_model and mock_model. I do not use them enough to get fluent with them. Every time I have to deal with them, something breaks in...

Order of execution of before blocks in RSpec

less than 1 minute read

I discovered that before blocks in RSpec’s examples are executed in the order they are declared. There is no great deal about it, but it can be useful when u...

Back to top ↑

mocking

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

How NOT to use mocks, my talk at Paris.rb

less than 1 minute read

As I already wrote about, mocks can be trecherous … I gave a talk about how to avoid them last tuesday at Paris.rb meetup. Here are the slides.

stub_model and mock_model

less than 1 minute read

I decided to stop using stub_model and mock_model. I do not use them enough to get fluent with them. Every time I have to deal with them, something breaks in...

Back to top ↑

large-scale-refactoring-sponsorship-series

Back to top ↑

change management

Back to top ↑

planning

How to play planning poker… Badass Mode!

1 minute read

Planning poker and story points often turn into a power struggle where everyone loses. Here are 2 winning strategies for how to play planning poker as dev te...

Can agile teams commit?

3 minute read

Making commitments to deliver software is always difficult. Whatever the margin you might take, it invariably seems wrong afterward …

Back to top ↑

selforganizing

A Lego Office Experiment

1 minute read

Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will be your Lego Office … This week is Devoxx in Paris, for the occasion, we decided to stream a Lego office experiment ...

Make hiring everyone’s business

3 minute read

Let me tell you a typical hiring story. A bit more than 10 years ago, I was contractor at a bank on a C++ front office application. The system had initially ...

Scrum teams do not need A Scrum Master

1 minute read

We don’t have an official scrum master in our team anymore. We now have 7 ! A different team member assumes the full scrum master role at every sprint.

Recipes For An Agile Workspace

4 minute read

Nowadays, start-ups and tech companies seem to be competing for the most beautiful offices in order to attract top talents.

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Back to top ↑

learning

Back to top ↑

mob programming

TO DO list or Mind Map for programming

5 minute read

Maintaining a TO DO list or a Mind Map for programming task has many benefits. It improves collaboration, our decisions and our vision of what’s left to do.

Back to top ↑

mikado-method

TO DO list or Mind Map for programming

5 minute read

Maintaining a TO DO list or a Mind Map for programming task has many benefits. It improves collaboration, our decisions and our vision of what’s left to do.

Most Scrum teams are not agile

7 minute read

Being agile is about adapting to change and continuously improving. I’ve seen (and been) in too many teams blindly following Scrum (Scrum Zombies) without fi...

Refactoring trick to insert a wrapper

1 minute read

Last week at work, we decided that we needed an Anticorruption Layer between our code and another team’s. They have been using our internal data structures a...

Back to top ↑

management30

Kudo Boxes for Kids

1 minute read

How do you get your kids to participate with housekeeping ? I guess that’s the dream of all parents. As so, we’ve tried quite a lot of tactics throughout the...

Make hiring everyone’s business

3 minute read

Let me tell you a typical hiring story. A bit more than 10 years ago, I was contractor at a bank on a C++ front office application. The system had initially ...

Scrum teams do not need A Scrum Master

1 minute read

We don’t have an official scrum master in our team anymore. We now have 7 ! A different team member assumes the full scrum master role at every sprint.

Back to top ↑

joke

The Size Of Code

2 minute read

The CFO’s debt is visible in his balance sheet. The CTO’s technical debt is invisible. What about making it visible ?

Anti Ugly-Code Glasses

less than 1 minute read

I think I found a way to fix the dirty code problem once and for all …

Binary Hand Planning Poker

less than 1 minute read

At work, we are using as we all have Android phones, we are using the Scrum Poker Cards app to do our planning poker.

Silosis

less than 1 minute read

I just invented the word, I found it funny :

Back to top ↑

management

Side Projects Matter

6 minute read

As a manager, you could benefit a lot from helping your developers with their side projects.

How to kill Scrum Zombies ?

3 minute read

First of all, what is that ? Usually, Scrum zombies go in groups, and quite often, you’ll find a full team of them :

Scrum teams do not need A Scrum Master

1 minute read

We don’t have an official scrum master in our team anymore. We now have 7 ! A different team member assumes the full scrum master role at every sprint.

The Holy Code Antipattern

2 minute read

As I’ve encountered this situation in different disguise in different companies, I now assume it’s a widely applied antipattern.

Back to top ↑

improvement kata

How to run your first improvement kata

3 minute read

The improvement kata can solve problems that typical retrospectives fail to address. Although there is a halo of mystery around it, it’s actually not that di...

Back to top ↑

heroku

Using gems instead of rails plugins on heroku

less than 1 minute read

Heroku is great, you can have a rails app running live in a few minutes ! There are still a few tricky points you’ve got to sort out a little differently. On...

Back to top ↑

scrum

Most Scrum teams are not agile

7 minute read

Being agile is about adapting to change and continuously improving. I’ve seen (and been) in too many teams blindly following Scrum (Scrum Zombies) without fi...

Sprints are not sprints

less than 1 minute read

I really don’t know why Scrum Sprints are called sprints ! From my experience, the number one mistake made by team starting with Scrum is to work as quickly ...

Scaling Agile

2 minute read

I have worked in small agile teams, and it does indeed work a lot better than the classical waterfall & hierarchic environment. When speaking with other ...

Back to top ↑

example mapping

Back to top ↑

collaborative work

Back to top ↑

retrospectives

Most Scrum teams are not agile

7 minute read

Being agile is about adapting to change and continuously improving. I’ve seen (and been) in too many teams blindly following Scrum (Scrum Zombies) without fi...

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Back to top ↑

business value

Too busy to prioritize?

less than 1 minute read

This infographic presents how the lack of prioritization triggers a vicious circle of bloated organizations, late deliveries, and a non-sustainable pace

Back to top ↑

docker

Back to top ↑

how-to-avoid-mocks-series

How Immutable Value Objects fight Mocks

3 minute read

Excessive use of mocks makes tests very painful to maintain. If we stick painful mocks for too long, we’ll end up abandoning unit testing. Eventually, the sy...

Back to top ↑

infographic

Does Programming equal Refactoring?

1 minute read

This infographics presents how TCR increases the share of refactoring in TDD. But Refactoring is already most of our daily work! We’d better learn it serious...

How to play planning poker… Badass Mode!

1 minute read

Planning poker and story points often turn into a power struggle where everyone loses. Here are 2 winning strategies for how to play planning poker as dev te...

Too busy to prioritize?

less than 1 minute read

This infographic presents how the lack of prioritization triggers a vicious circle of bloated organizations, late deliveries, and a non-sustainable pace

Back to top ↑

gem

Online store scrapping DSL gem

1 minute read

Since I decided to stop Mes Courses to focus on AgileAvatars, I have been extracting open source gems from the code base. The last one is Storexplore : a dec...

Ruby thirdparties best practices

less than 1 minute read

I am just finishing migrating www.mes-courses.fr from rails 2 to rails 3, and I can assure that I learnt these lessons the hard way …

Using gems instead of rails plugins on heroku

less than 1 minute read

Heroku is great, you can have a rails app running live in a few minutes ! There are still a few tricky points you’ve got to sort out a little differently. On...

Back to top ↑

psychology

Coding Dojo Troubleshooting

3 minute read

In my last 2 blog posts, I’ve detailed why and how to start a team Randori Coding Dojo. That’s the easy part. As soon as you start your first dojo, you’ll fa...

Back to top ↑

large scale

Back to top ↑

badass-developer

How to play planning poker… Badass Mode!

1 minute read

Planning poker and story points often turn into a power struggle where everyone loses. Here are 2 winning strategies for how to play planning poker as dev te...

Back to top ↑

sustainable pace

Back to top ↑

blogging

5 Years of Blogging About Software

3 minute read

5 years ago, I started blogging. I started really casually, my posts were personal reminders and notes rather than real well thought of articles. Nevertheles...

A useful link to find free pictures

less than 1 minute read

While I was looking for photos for an article on blog for mes-courses.fr, I found this site : http://www.photo-libre.fr. There are a lot of pictures, both €-...

Back to top ↑

cucumber

If new cucumber transform breaks everyhing …

less than 1 minute read

After reading The cucumber book I decided to add clever cucumber transforms but steps started to fail all over the place … Even completly unrelated scenarios...

Back to top ↑

bdd

If new cucumber transform breaks everyhing …

less than 1 minute read

After reading The cucumber book I decided to add clever cucumber transforms but steps started to fail all over the place … Even completly unrelated scenarios...

Back to top ↑

performance

How To Write Good Performance Stories

2 minute read

If you’re having difficulties writing good performance related stories for your project, that’s no surprise ! We’ve been through the same troubles and we fou...

Performance is a feature

1 minute read

Now that is a widespread title for blog articles ! Just search Google, and you’ll find “Performance is a feature” in Coding Horror and others.

Back to top ↑

career

Developer ! Are you losing your rat race ?

4 minute read

A rat race is an endless, self-defeating, or pointless pursuit. It conjures up the image of the futile efforts of a lab rat trying to escape while running...

5 Years of Blogging About Software

3 minute read

5 years ago, I started blogging. I started really casually, my posts were personal reminders and notes rather than real well thought of articles. Nevertheles...

How To Keep Up With Software Technologies

3 minute read

Since I started to program professionally 15 years ago, a lot of things have changes. A lot of technologies appeared and became mainstream while others fell ...

Back to top ↑

machine learning

Back to top ↑

incremental-software-development

Back to top ↑

tcr

Does Programming equal Refactoring?

1 minute read

This infographics presents how TCR increases the share of refactoring in TDD. But Refactoring is already most of our daily work! We’d better learn it serious...

Back to top ↑

c-sharp

Windows licker like with C#

1 minute read

In Growing object-oriented software guided by tests they use a java library called Window Licker to pilot a gui running in test thread. Next time I started a...

Making C# properties first class objects

1 minute read

Functions and methods have a better status in the .Net world than they had in the Java world … They are now first class. This means that it is possible to as...

Back to top ↑

gamification

Vertical Kanban Board Setups

4 minute read

Turning Kanban boards vertically fits western cultures better. Improving UX of our process tools would eventually lead to a more effective and sustainable pa...

Motivation game

1 minute read

At MegaCorp where I am currently working, there is a small team that is dedicated to find solutions to software bugs that regularly happen in production. The...

Back to top ↑

web

I just replaced Feedburner with MailChimp

1 minute read

Until now, I had been using Feedburner to manage the email subscriptions to my blog on mes-courses.fr. It had been working fine I thought it had been working...

#1 rule for monitoring emails

less than 1 minute read

I just spent a few hours debugging my rails app on Heroku to understand why the hell I did not systematically receive the monitoring emails that my app was s...

Back to top ↑

side project

13 Tricks for Successful Side Projects

8 minute read

As I said last week, I released the v0.1 of Philou’s Planning Poker, my latest side project. Although I have a day job, a wife, a family and a mortgage to pa...

Side Projects Matter

6 minute read

As a manager, you could benefit a lot from helping your developers with their side projects.

Back to top ↑

book

How To Keep Up With Software Technologies

3 minute read

Since I started to program professionally 15 years ago, a lot of things have changes. A lot of technologies appeared and became mainstream while others fell ...

Back to top ↑

octopress

5 Years of Blogging About Software

3 minute read

5 years ago, I started blogging. I started really casually, my posts were personal reminders and notes rather than real well thought of articles. Nevertheles...

Setting up Octopress with Vagrant and rbenv

3 minute read

I recently got hands on an abandonned laptop that was better than the one I was currently using for my personnal hackings, so I decided to switch to this one...

Back to top ↑

workplace

A Lego Office Experiment

1 minute read

Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will be your Lego Office … This week is Devoxx in Paris, for the occasion, we decided to stream a Lego office experiment ...

Recipes For An Agile Workspace

4 minute read

Nowadays, start-ups and tech companies seem to be competing for the most beautiful offices in order to attract top talents.

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Back to top ↑

kanban

Vertical Kanban Board Setups

4 minute read

Turning Kanban boards vertically fits western cultures better. Improving UX of our process tools would eventually lead to a more effective and sustainable pa...

My Ultimate Jira Personal Kanban

5 minute read

A few years ago, I wrote about how I started to use Jira as my personal Kanban board at work. A lot of things have changed since then, which brought me to up...

Back to top ↑

first-improvement-kata-series

Back to top ↑

quality

Back to top ↑

javascript

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Back to top ↑

open-source

Back to top ↑

code reviews

How to get your team to do code reviews

6 minute read

As software developers, we very always often get to work in code bases that are not perfect. In this situation we have 3 choices : leave, grumble, or make so...

Back to top ↑

vagrant

Setting up Octopress with Vagrant and rbenv

3 minute read

I recently got hands on an abandonned laptop that was better than the one I was currently using for my personnal hackings, so I decided to switch to this one...

Back to top ↑

java

Back to top ↑

zero-bugs-series

Back to top ↑

agile-transformations-fail-series

Back to top ↑

team-randori-series

Coding Dojo Troubleshooting

3 minute read

In my last 2 blog posts, I’ve detailed why and how to start a team Randori Coding Dojo. That’s the easy part. As soon as you start your first dojo, you’ll fa...

Back to top ↑

how-to-run-a-design-level-event-storming-series

Back to top ↑

SSL

Devise, SSL requirements and post data

less than 1 minute read

I am using rails 2.3.8, devise 1.0.11 and ssl_requirements 0.1.0. I am having strange behaviour when mixing devise with ssl_requirements. When a form posts t...

Back to top ↑

postgre

Back to top ↑

side-project

Back to top ↑

open source

Online store scrapping DSL gem

1 minute read

Since I decided to stop Mes Courses to focus on AgileAvatars, I have been extracting open source gems from the code base. The last one is Storexplore : a dec...

Back to top ↑

complexity

Back to top ↑

continuous-integration

Back to top ↑

hiring

Make hiring everyone’s business

3 minute read

Let me tell you a typical hiring story. A bit more than 10 years ago, I was contractor at a bank on a C++ front office application. The system had initially ...

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Back to top ↑

how to guide

Back to top ↑

mikado-method-organization-series

Back to top ↑

20-hours-code-kata-series

Back to top ↑

why-machine-learning-in-software-engineering-series

Back to top ↑

more-event-storming-tips-series

Back to top ↑

rake

Using gems instead of rails plugins on heroku

less than 1 minute read

Heroku is great, you can have a rails app running live in a few minutes ! There are still a few tricky points you’ve got to sort out a little differently. On...

Back to top ↑

radiant-tags-extension

Back to top ↑

Best Practices

Ruby thirdparties best practices

less than 1 minute read

I am just finishing migrating www.mes-courses.fr from rails 2 to rails 3, and I can assure that I learnt these lessons the hard way …

Collecting agile and XP best practices

less than 1 minute read

There is a huge difference between reading about agile software developpment, and being an agile developper or team. There are a lot of practical best practi...

Back to top ↑

Devise

Devise, SSL requirements and post data

less than 1 minute read

I am using rails 2.3.8, devise 1.0.11 and ssl_requirements 0.1.0. I am having strange behaviour when mixing devise with ssl_requirements. When a form posts t...

external gem rails generator not found

less than 1 minute read

When trying to use devise 1.0.11 with rails 2.3.8 and bundler 1.0.10, I got the error could not find generator ... when running bundle exec script/generate d...

Back to top ↑

workaround

external gem rails generator not found

less than 1 minute read

When trying to use devise 1.0.11 with rails 2.3.8 and bundler 1.0.10, I got the error could not find generator ... when running bundle exec script/generate d...

Back to top ↑

enterprise

Great Developers Are Free

4 minute read

For many reasons. But mostly because they are key to efficiently growing a software organization.

Scaling Agile

2 minute read

I have worked in small agile teams, and it does indeed work a lot better than the classical waterfall & hierarchic environment. When speaking with other ...

Back to top ↑

unix

Using stock ruby with rbenv

less than 1 minute read

While migrating to ruby 1.9, I started using rbenv. I was wondering how it would handle my stock ubuntu ruby 1.8. It works out of the box with the rbenv “sys...

Back to top ↑

exploitation

#1 rule for monitoring emails

less than 1 minute read

I just spent a few hours debugging my rails app on Heroku to understand why the hell I did not systematically receive the monitoring emails that my app was s...

Back to top ↑

html

Back to top ↑

regex

Ruby regex captures oneliner

1 minute read

Surely this post is nothing new for experienced ruby developpers, but I found it so handy, that I thought it deserved a post of its own though. The problem i...

Rubular: a really usefull ruby regex tool

less than 1 minute read

Working with regular expressions is always a try and fail and retry … experience. It really helps to have an interactive tool with which to tune up your expr...

Back to top ↑

jasmine

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Back to top ↑

startup

Back to top ↑

scrapping

Online store scrapping DSL gem

1 minute read

Since I decided to stop Mes Courses to focus on AgileAvatars, I have been extracting open source gems from the code base. The last one is Storexplore : a dec...

Back to top ↑

comic

Back to top ↑

travis

Back to top ↑

antipattern

The Holy Code Antipattern

2 minute read

As I’ve encountered this situation in different disguise in different companies, I now assume it’s a widely applied antipattern.

Back to top ↑

jira

My Ultimate Jira Personal Kanban

5 minute read

A few years ago, I wrote about how I started to use Jira as my personal Kanban board at work. A lot of things have changed since then, which brought me to up...

Back to top ↑

ubuntu

Back to top ↑

rexp

ReXP : Remote eXtreme Programming

1 minute read

My colleague Ahmad from Beirut gave a talk at Agile Tour Beirut on Saturday about how we adopted XP to a distributed team at work. I gave him a hand and play...

Back to top ↑

event-storming-outputs-series

Back to top ↑

data driven

Back to top ↑

remote-pair-programming-best-practices-series

Back to top ↑

remote-open-space-series

Back to top ↑

event-storming-and-ddd-injection-series

Back to top ↑

refactorging

Back to top ↑

goal setting

Back to top ↑

workshop

Back to top ↑

css

Back to top ↑

radiant

Back to top ↑

binding

Making C# properties first class objects

1 minute read

Functions and methods have a better status in the .Net world than they had in the Java world … They are now first class. This means that it is possible to as...

Back to top ↑

UI

Making C# properties first class objects

1 minute read

Functions and methods have a better status in the .Net world than they had in the Java world … They are now first class. This means that it is possible to as...

Back to top ↑

pictures

A useful link to find free pictures

less than 1 minute read

While I was looking for photos for an article on blog for mes-courses.fr, I found this site : http://www.photo-libre.fr. There are a lot of pictures, both €-...

Back to top ↑

Hacking

Hackers et peintres

30 minute read

This is a french translation of the famous Hackers and painters essay written by Paul Graham.

Back to top ↑

Lean

Motivation game

1 minute read

At MegaCorp where I am currently working, there is a small team that is dedicated to find solutions to software bugs that regularly happen in production. The...

Back to top ↑

DNS

Back to top ↑

memory

The poor man’s memory profiling

1 minute read

While working on www.mes-courses.fr, a background scheduled task that was running fine on heroku started to fail with out of memory errors. After searching a...

Back to top ↑

chrome

Back to top ↑

coffeescript

Jasmine and coffeescript setup for rails

1 minute read

As I started to write more javascript code in my rails app, it became obvious that I should be testing it ! I wanted to use jasmine and coffeescript. I searc...

Back to top ↑

agileavatars.com

Back to top ↑

boostrapping

Back to top ↑

rss

I just replaced Feedburner with MailChimp

1 minute read

Until now, I had been using Feedburner to manage the email subscriptions to my blog on mes-courses.fr. It had been working fine I thought it had been working...

Back to top ↑

assets

Back to top ↑

functional programming

Trying to explain monads in java

1 minute read

A few days ago, a colleague currently taking the coursera course about reactive programming in scala, asked me to explain him what monads are. It’s always a ...

Back to top ↑

monads

Trying to explain monads in java

1 minute read

A few days ago, a colleague currently taking the coursera course about reactive programming in scala, asked me to explain him what monads are. It’s always a ...

Back to top ↑

kata

Trying to explain monads in java

1 minute read

A few days ago, a colleague currently taking the coursera course about reactive programming in scala, asked me to explain him what monads are. It’s always a ...

Back to top ↑

dsl

Online store scrapping DSL gem

1 minute read

Since I decided to stop Mes Courses to focus on AgileAvatars, I have been extracting open source gems from the code base. The last one is Storexplore : a dec...

Back to top ↑

seo

Back to top ↑

reflexion

Back to top ↑

API

Back to top ↑

anticorruption layer

Refactoring trick to insert a wrapper

1 minute read

Last week at work, we decided that we needed an Anticorruption Layer between our code and another team’s. They have been using our internal data structures a...

Back to top ↑

clean code

Back to top ↑

matcher

Back to top ↑

mes-courses

Back to top ↑

lessons-learned

Back to top ↑

code

The Holy Code Antipattern

2 minute read

As I’ve encountered this situation in different disguise in different companies, I now assume it’s a widely applied antipattern.

Back to top ↑

risks

Can agile teams commit?

3 minute read

Making commitments to deliver software is always difficult. Whatever the margin you might take, it invariably seems wrong afterward …

Back to top ↑

concurrency

Back to top ↑

github

Back to top ↑

feedback

Back to top ↑

linux

Back to top ↑

screencast

Back to top ↑

algorithms

Back to top ↑

lean-startup

Back to top ↑

company-bonus

Back to top ↑

trello

Back to top ↑

clojure

Back to top ↑

distributed systems

Back to top ↑

sqlite

Back to top ↑

action-cable

Back to top ↑

contracts

Almost 15 years of using Design By Contract

6 minute read

I first read about Design By Contract in 2002, in Object Oriented Software Construction 2. As soon as I read it, I was convinced, today, I still believe it’s...

Back to top ↑

functional-programming

Almost 15 years of using Design By Contract

6 minute read

I first read about Design By Contract in 2002, in Object Oriented Software Construction 2. As soon as I read it, I was convinced, today, I still believe it’s...

Back to top ↑

best practices

How to get your team to do code reviews

6 minute read

As software developers, we very always often get to work in code bases that are not perfect. In this situation we have 3 choices : leave, grumble, or make so...

Back to top ↑

code-analysis

Back to top ↑

documentation

Back to top ↑

coding-dojo

Back to top ↑

tech lead

Back to top ↑

customer relationship

Back to top ↑

serverless

Back to top ↑

personal productivity

Back to top ↑

facilitation

Back to top ↑

liberating structures

Back to top ↑

coaching by example

Back to top ↑

collaboration

Back to top ↑

communication

Back to top ↑