This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Sometimes It's Easy Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

As I've mentioned in passing, I'm working on a story-driven development application called Kipling and I'm "dogfooding" it on my current project. There's nothing like a dose of criticality to add urgency to a side project -- then again sometimes you realize that despite good intentions dogfooding is just not going to work. This week I finally came to grips with the fact that I don't have time to do a full-time job, edit a series, write a book AND add features to Kipling fast enough to satisfy my project management requirements. So I did what any sane project manager would do: turn to trusty Excel.

One of the great aspects of working for ThoughtWorks is that you have access to some pretty frickin brilliant people to help you out when you're in need. In this case, one of our most talented project managers, Mark "Sparky" Rickmeier hooked me up with the small/medium version of his project tracking spreadsheet. I'd seen it before, but never realized how useful it is until I pulled the story list out of Kipling and copied it into Sparky's spreadsheet. We're talking information galore, with tons of graphs and fancy tabular calculations, enough to make your head spin.

Sometimes it's hard to get information from an application into Excel and other times it's pretty easy. This time it was easy. I briefly considered doing a database dump from Postgres and then (duh) realized that I could get the job done with a few lines of Ruby.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require File.dirname(__FILE__) + '/../config/boot'
require RAILS_ROOT + '/config/environment'

Story.find(:all).each do |story|
  puts "%s,%s,%s\n" % [ story.id, story.name, story.points ]
end

It took exactly 2.5 minutes to write this script, then run it and pipe the output into a file in my /public directory for easy downloading. Thank you Rails.