Noel Rappin Writes Here

At our current size, Table XI is in an interesting place. We’re still small enough that everybody can fit in a single room, but large enough that people on different teams don’t always know what everyone else is doing. However, trying to let everybody know what’s going on often leads to problems similar to bad agile standups. Everybody is waiting for their turn to speak; nobody is listening to everybody; everybody is bored.

You have no idea how happy I am to announce that Book 4 of Master Space and Time with JavaScript: Ember is now on sale. You can buy it at /mstwjs It’s not done, of course. But it’s off to a good start, and I think it’s going to be great. Here’s the state of the world: Release 1 of the Ember book is $7, just like its recent siblings.

The state of the Noel Rappin publishing — I can use the word “empire”, right? MSTWJS 3: Backbone Master Space and Time With JavaScript, Book 3: Backbone is draft complete as of today’s release except for a page or so of summary at the end, which I will probably wait to write until the Ember chapter is complete. The next release will be an edit pass, to clean up typos and bad sentences, smooth over the explanation, fix errata and generally polish stuff.

Last year, when Obtiva was purchased by Groupon, I wrote a “what I learned” post talking about things I thought I came to understand about software projects after working on a bunch of them. Now that I’ve moved on from Groupon, I started to think about what, if anything, I learned while I was there. I keep coming back to three different things – this is a more personal set of lessons than the last batch, so maybe they’ll be less generally useful.

Something like 25 years ago, Bill James wrote an essay asserting that one difference between smart and dumb baseball organizations was that dumb organizations behaved as thought Major League talent was normally distributed on a standard bell curve, and smart organizations knew that talent is not (it’s the far end of a bell curve). Hold that thought. So I just finished reading Laurent Bossavit’s self published book The Leprechauns of Software Engeneering, which I recommend quite highly.

Oh yeah, things happening… Got A New Job, Got A New Office First off, I’ve started a new job as a Senior Developer and Agile Coach at Table XI, putting me back in the realm of small, Chicago-based consulting companies. Very exited, Table XI seems like a great place so far. Hoping to do new things, challenge myself, and learn. Book Update Most importantly, you can still buy it. It’s going slowly but steadily, thanks for asking.

Charles Max Wood posted this on Twitter: Am I misunderstanding agile? or is it inappropriate to try to peg velocity? — Charles Max Wood (@cmaxw) October 26, 2012 @noelrap They’re telling us we behind on the sprint. My understanding of agile is velocity is set by team pace, not wishful thinking. — Charles Max Wood (@cmaxw) October 26, 2012 @noelrap You can push for deadlines, but you can’t tell us that we’re behind on the sprint just because we’re not going to achieve velocity.

Here’s some JavaScript: var foo = function(a, b) { return a * b }; var bar = function(func) { return function() { return func.apply(this, arguments) }; }; baz = bar(foo); console.log(baz(2, 3)); What we have here is a function, bar, that both takes a function as an argument and returns a function as it’s result. It’s transforming the function passed to it into a different function. Okay, that’s cool in kind of an abstract way, but so what?

Here’s a quick status update on Master Space and Time With JavaScript, book 3… Short version: expect an early beta of about 1/3 of the book to be out in about a week. Longer version: Work is proceeding steadily, the current draft of just hit 30 pages toward a target of around 90, though about 10 of that is the same intro and outro that the other books have, so it’s more like 20 pages toward a target of 80.

The reported errata for Master Time and Space With JavaScript (buy it here) has been pretty light so far. A bunch of typos, some setup weirdness. And one interesting issue worth exploring. What is a dependency, and maybe more to the point, where is a dependency? This issue was raised by a reviewer whose name I’m not going to mention — that’s not a reflection on the reviewer, but rather a reflection on the fact that I’m going to put words in his mouth to expand on his brief comment on the issue, so my interpretation of his position may not actually be his position.