Daily log - April 14, 2009

Cucumber win I completed the first weekly “release” of my new project today. After I merged a number of commits from our designer, I ran the Cucumber suite and the spec suite. Nothing failed in the specs, but Cucumber found a regression that was caused by a minor mis-nesting of conditionals in one template. I was able to fix the problem in mere moments, commit, push, and deploy. With our old process, that change would not likely have been found until much later. WIN!

More Cucumber win I completed converting Radiant’s integration specs over to Cucumber stories today (see github). What does this mean? One — we’ll be able to more quickly and efficiently build new features in the core that are tested top-to-bottom; and two — you will soon be able to write cucumber features in your extensions.

Don’t be so hard on yourself, it’s not you. I was reminded of Liz Gilbert’s TED presentation today. If you haven’t seen this yet, you should definitely watch it. She basically says that since the Renaissance, we have internalized the font of creativity, whereas ancient cultures viewed the “genius” (as she calls it) as other. Her point is that in doing this, we put too much pressure on the individual’s performance and set ourselves up for devastating failure. Even if you don’t believe in something supernatural or paranormal, the concept can still be useful to promote a healthy attitude toward creativity. To me, this has special relevance in the tech community lately, especially with respect to the emphasis on wanting ROCKSTAR developers/sysadmins/whatever. It’s better to get someone who consistently produces good, reliable code and can play well with others. I want to be a “Jazzer” developer.