I’ve been watching Ken Burn’s documentary Baseball again recently and am really enjoying it.  I don’t get enough baseball in the UK (at least, not without waking up really early), so it’s nice to get some baseball history at least.

I was watching last night a section about how, in the 1930s, Cincinnati Reds Owner Larry McFail brought in radio broadcasts for all games.  He brought in Red Barber (they later moved to the Brooklyn Dodgers).

Red Barber said something that applies a lot to the current Open Source (and probably even Piracy models):

“When radio came along, some of the entrenched conservative owners say “Hey, wait a minute.  Why give away something something that you are trying to sell for your living?  To keep your enterprise afloat?  An especially on days of threatening weather when people would say ‘Well, it looks like it may rain.  I’ll just listen to the radio and I won’t go.'” They did not realize at that time that it would be creating new fans.  That it would be making families of fans.  Before radio, by and large, the people who came into a ballpark were men.  Once radio came along, and came into the homes, women began to understand the game.  They didn’t have to have someone explain it to them–the play by play broadcaster was doing it. And attendance visibly went up when you had families coming instead of single members of the family. And that was the beginning of the impact of radio.  Radio made new fans.”

There’s a very entrepreneurial instinct to keep the cards close to the chest and do all of your sales with “Sell, sell, sell”. 

When baseball was broadcast on radio, it wasn’t “Free for 30 days” or “Limited functionality”.  There was no plan to “Give it away for free now.  When people start listening, we’ll charge them.”

Ken Schwaber, one of the founders of Scrum, is the guest of this week’s Hanselminutes podcast. He talks about something that is dear to my heart– “What is done?”

One of my biggest headaches as a developer is trying to convince junior developers of the necessity of unit testing and refactorable code. There is never enough time. It’s always a nice-to-have.

I’ve been involved in more projects during the 11th hour than I’ve been involved in project outsets. Frequently, my involvement has to do with a misunderstood requirement which require a full rewrite in ordedr to get it to work. It requires loads of manual testing because no one knows with certainty if the new code breaks the old code.

Unit tests can only be written by developer at the time of development. If they are not there, the developer has no business saying they are finished with that bit of functionality.

It’s a good podcast. If you have a chance, Google it and have a listen.

So I’ve started playing with Ruby finally. I have no plans on dropping c#, but I really want to see what all of the hype is about.

Like .Net, I get the feeling (so far) that it tries to do too much for you. I remember being at a seminar at the Microsoft Campus in Reading when .Net first came out and a 5-minute database application was developed with all wizards. The experienced developers in the crowd groaned. But, eventually, we all found out how to dig down deeper and optimise. I guess that’s how Ruby will work too.

A few things I really like about the Ruby on Rails framework so far:

1. MVC by default

2. Automated Testing is emphasized

3. Strict Object Orientation

4. Stresses Agile development

Like many things, this is just a fad for me. I’m playing with the language (unless it is really, really good and I decide to be an out of work Ruby contractor newbie) and will probably just write some sample apps to see how it handles before moving on.

The book I’m reading is “Agile Development with Rails” by Dave Thomas and David Heinemeier Hansson. So far I am enjoying the book. My favourite line so far: “Professional programmers write tests.”