I've had this problem repeatedly with RJS, and I'm not saying it's not something that I'm doing... in fact, if I had to take a bet on whether the problem is in my code or the RJS code, I'd bet it's my code. :) Never the less, I've seen several pages online where this has been an issue for other people and it keeps coming back to haunt me, so...

I've had this problem repeatedly with RJS, and I'm not saying it's not something that I'm doing... in fact, if I had to take a bet on whether the problem is in my code or the RJS code, I'd bet it's my code. :) Never the less, I've seen several pages online where this has been an issue for other people and it keeps coming back to haunt me, so...

I'll be traveling to San Jose in July to participate in The Agile Experience. The slate of speakers looks great and I'm expecting to have a great time. I suspect this is going to be one of those conferences where you're annoyed that you're speaking because you're missing great content in the next room. And when you're not speaking, there are...

I'll be traveling to San Jose in July to participate in The Agile Experience. The slate of speakers looks great and I'm expecting to have a great time. I suspect this is going to be one of those conferences where you're annoyed that you're speaking because you're missing great content in the next room. And when you're not speaking, there are...

Just a quick reminder, if you're in the Research Triangle Park, come join us at Agile RTP at our first meeting. I announced it here last week, but I find people tend to attend events better when they are announced on the day of the event. Neil Fox and Symphony are buying a few snacks and appetizers before the meeting, so come early to mingle...

I didn't realize it until I arrived, but the Milwaukee show last weekend was the 100th NFJS show. I'm honored to be invovled with this group of developers and speakers. I just wanted to take a moment and say "Thanks" to Jay Zimmerman for continuing to hit the road and keep the shows going. And also to everyone who's attended. There would be no...

How do you keep yourself sharp, personally and professionally? Especially now that I work for myself, I want to push myself to make sure I keep learning new things. A tutorial a day? Or a week? No less than that. Try to pick out something each week that you don't know how to do. If it's something you need to know, all the better. For me that...

Are you a fan of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and in the RTP area? If so, come out and join us on our first meeting. Thursday, March 22nd we'll get together at Frankie's (near Briar Creek) and have a combination kick-off meeting and also a shared event with the agile-carolinas group in Charlotte. Dr. Laurie Williams will be...

Starting this weekend in balmy Milwaukee, the No Fluff Just Stuff tour kicks off and I'm doing a lot more shows this year. So far I'm scheduled for Boston, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Portland, Reston, and Denver. And that's just the next two months! :) I'm also headed to Rails Conf this year and I might be speaking at OSCon on extending Ruby and...

Have you seen the "Five Things You Don't Know About Me" tags going by? David Starr tagged me and I'm finally getting around to posting my five things. I'll bet you didn't know I once removed asbestos... asbestos removal paid for the first half of my college education. When you see all those blogs trying to run up their Google Adsense revenue by...

Dave Thomas was going back through his notes about the meeting in which the Agile Manifesto was crafted and found some real gems. It reminded me of a topic I've been meaning to blog about for some time. The next time an acolyte of some methodology or another tries to force you into their favorite practice, "Because It's Agile!", ask them to...

I'll be speaking (locally for a change!) tonight at the RTP Java User's Group. The topic is Agile Testing Strategies... it's the same talk I gave at the Charlotte JUG in January and in Denver last fall. In development, just like in testing, we're often given work to do but rarely given a strategy to reach those goals. Test automation is a topic...

Once your Rails application starts to get serious, you start measuring it's performance. And you immediately realize that Rexml is slow. Real slow. It's still fast enough for most applications, but when you start thinking on the enterprise level, you don't use Rexml... you look for alternatives. And when you start searching and asking people,...

This took me several days to dig out, so I thought I'd blog it and maybe save someone else the research time we lost. FireFox truncates your HTML to 4,906 characters when you're creating HTML elements (createElement). So when you're developing, it looks like you're seeing random HTML weirdness. By the time you've got 4k of data, it's pretty...

If you haven't made it to a RailsEdge yet, then you've missed an incredible event. The instructors are simply an all-star lineup. Where else do you get to learn Rake from Jim Weirich, the author? Rails tips from Dave Thomas? AJAX from Justin and Stu? There were experts on every facet of Ruby and Rails. The audience was also a great crowd...