Coding is like gardening...

Archive for December, 2009

Spring (well, Christmas) Cleaning

We’ve taken the step of organising our blogs a little over the last few days:

This blog (the one you’re currently reading) will remain the official Eden blog and will be used for posting finished articles, company news, occasional tips and comment on software development and craftsmanship.

We’ve also started combining blogs from the whole team. This new feed will keep you updated on all the goings on behind the scenes at the company, with software tips, useful code snippets, apprenticeship reports and up to the minute thought and debate. I highly recommend you subscribe here.

The above feed will also contain my (Chris’) blog posts from my new Jekyll/Github powered blog.

Hope that all makes sense :) normal service will be resumed shortly.

Posted on: Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 Posted in meta | Comments Off

Introducing my Apprentices: James and Richard

Recently, each of the three most experienced craftsmen at Eden has taken on one or two other developers under their wing as apprentices. These guys are all valuable and established members of the team, but we’re wanting to push them really hard so they can truly shine.

My apprentices are James Hunt and Richard Patching, both excellent and talented developers who joined Eden straight from university in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They’ve gained a lot of experience and skills already, and I’m really looking forward pushing them far beyond their comfort zones to be the best software craftsmen they can be.

They’ll both be blogging about their experiences: this blog will carry their posts also in the future. Mentoring others is not something I’ve done explicitly before, so I also intend to blog occasionally about lessons learned.

James and Richard’s first task was to present a software kata implementing the Binary Chop algorithm in Ruby and RSpec, using Test Driven Development to find a solution. They have two weeks to prepare. I’ll let you know how it goes…

Posted on: Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 Posted in craftsmanship | Comments Off