Keeping it fun, knowing when to stop

On Sunday afternoon, I had the pleasure to design and modify my girlfriend's, Alex, MySpace page for her band. It was a really fun experience. Often my work is solitary, programming alone without a pair. Sunday was my first experience for a longtime working with a pair. While it wasn't pair programming, you could describe it as pair design. She had a vision, and I had the technical skill set. While the project was relatively simple, there were a few constraints we were working with: the MySpace interface and my design skill set. Through the afternoon, there were ideas being bounced between us, and refinements moving forward. I loved it.

The hours flew by, and before we knew it it was time for dinner. Alex was keen to keep going since we were so close. I knew in reality that we had another couple of hours to go. So I said, "I want to keep this fun". I knew after a couple of hours, we would be tired and hungry. No more fun.

So we stopped, published what we had, and committed to finishing it the following weekend. It kept it fun.

I think we need to stop more often to keep things fun. Often we just keep going for the sake of finishing something completely. The web is great medium where we can publish work in progress, and come back to refine it. Often we have this notion of only publishing "completed" work. In reality, it's never completed and will always need refinement.

How do you keep it fun? Let me know in the comments.

Use Terminitor to get your Rails Development work flow setup quickly

For the average Rails Development project I have the following terminal windows setup:

• Spork for RSpec
• Spork for Cucumber
• Rails Server
• AutoSpec
• RStakeout task for automatically running Cuke Features

Automatic Workflow Setup

That's a lot of terminals to setup and task to execute! In comes Terminitor to automatically open those windows and run the required tasks. I have the following file in ~/.terminitor/rails-dev.yml:

# Rails Server, Rspec, Cucumber with Spork Setup
---
- tab0:
- tab1:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - spork rspec
- tab2:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - spork cuc
- tab3: 
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - script/server
- tab4:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - autospec -f
- tab5:
  - rvm use ruby-1.8.7-p302@default
  - autocuke

All I need to do is change into the directory of the project and execute:

  terminitor start rails-dev

I keep a blank tab, tab0 so I have a terminal window to play with, otherwise the first "tab" uses that window.

Issues

There was a only a couple of issues I came across which were pretty straightforward to work around. First, it didn't respect my default setup for rvm. I added what Ruby and Gemset to use.

The other issue was that it appeared to screw with by $PATH a bit. It added a space to the last path entry which I think was causing havoc. I just added $HOME to my path, I don't care if it messes with that.

Conclusion

I was definitely getting a little tired opening all the terminal windows for each project. This is well worth checking out.