After reading “Zsh Prompt Magic” I created the zsh_vcs_info file which you can download. You place it in your home directory and open .zshrc and add the following line:

source /home/user/.zsh_vcs_info

Notice that I added a . (dot) in the filename because I want it to be hidden. Also, notice that “user” in the path above, is the username of the account you use to log into Ubuntu.

The Daily Scrum is:

Daily Scrum
Each day during the sprint, a project status meeting occurs. This is called a “daily scrum”, or “the daily standup”. This meeting has specific guidelines:

• The meeting starts precisely on time.
• All are welcome, but only “pigs” may speak
• The meeting is timeboxed to 15 minutes
• The meeting should happen at the same location and same time every day

During the meeting, each team member answers three questions:

• What have you done since yesterday?
• What are you planning to do today?
• Do you have any problems preventing you from accomplishing your goal? (It is the role of the Scrum Master to facilitate resolution of these impediments. Typically this should occur outside the context of the Daily Scrum so that it may stay under 15 minutes.)

We are a remote team and we had to tweak it a little to fit our needs:

• Every morning at 10:00am we go to a Skype group chat that is only used for our Daily Scrum Meetings
• Each one of us says what they did yesterday, what they plan to accomplish today and mention any problems they have.
• Problems are then discussed after the meeting.
• The meeting never lasts more than 20 minutes.

Results are positive so far. First of all, we feel that someone hears what we do everyday. If we have any problems or questions we can ask our fellow team members for help. We are committed because we promise a daily plan and we want to deliver it. We stay focused. All that, by spending 20-30 everyday to plan our day and present that plan to our colleagues.

References:

1. Scrum (development)

First you need to install the gem:

sudo gem install pabarcode

then the example in the previous post needs to change so as it uses the gem instead of the plain Ruby file:

require "rubygems"
require "pabarcode"

include PAbarcode

file = File.open("apog.txt")

file.each do |line|
  bc = line.slice(0..11)
  bc13 = Barcode.new(bc).get_ean_13
  puts bc13 + line.slice(12..line.length)
end

file.close

Yesterday, a colleague of mine asked me to take as input a file with 12 characters long barcodes and add a check digit assuming the barcodes are EAN13. I decided to do it and also start maintaining a set of barcode helper classes written in Ruby. I haven’t created a gem yet, cause the functionality is … lets say limited , but I plan to do so later.

You can go to

http://github.com/amiridis/rbarcode

and just download the barcode.rb file.

Here is how I used the barcode.rb file in order to transform the file:

require "barcode"

file = File.open("apog.txt")

file.each do |line|
  bc = line.slice(0..11)
  bc13 = Barcode.new(bc).get_ean_13
  puts bc13 + line.slice(12..line.length)
end

file.close

The file had the following format:

520532435284;1;09
520532435285;1;09
520532463580;1;09

and for the three lines above it produces:

5205324352841;1;09
5205324352858;1;09
5205324635807;1;09

Update: I have changed this project to a gem. You can read about it in my PAbarcode gem post.

We are 4 and we work 4 days per week remotely.

We do roughly 32.000 kilometers to go to work and get back home, so that’s 32.000 less per year.

Assuming our cars emit 160g of CO2 per kilometer on average.

We emit 5.120.000g less CO2 per year!!!

That’s 5.12 tonnes less CO2 per year!!!

And this is our action for the environment.

<%= link_to 'List of posts', posts_path %>

or the following in the controller:

redirect_to posts_url

Why should I use _url in the controller. I have used _path and it seems to work.

This is an explanation I found in a forum and I quote:

*_path are for views because ahrefs are implicitly linked to the current URL. So it’d be a waste of bytes to repeat it over and over. In the controller, though, *_url is needed for redirect_to because the HTTP specification mandates that the Location: header in 3xx redirects is a complete URL.

I started this activity in June 2009 by becoming a member of Builders, a RailsBridge project, that connects volunteers with projects for 501c3 non-profits.

So far, I am volunteering in two projects: 1) Sunset PTA and GlamourGals Foundation.

The basic reasons I do this are:

• Learn
• Network
• Give back

I learn asking questions or watching other team members doing stuff I don’t know. I discovered this way of learning is much faster than just reading and online searching. It cannot replace these of course, but it can help in addition to these methods of learning. Sometimes, when I learn something new from a fellow team member, I feel that it would be very difficult to discover it by myself.

When you volunteer to various projects, it is very easy to meet people with more or less the same mentality as yours. You get the opportunity to know them, open up your mind to new ways of thinking, choose who you like better and maybe create stronger relationships that may lead to other forms of cooperation in the future. This is extremely difficult to accomplish if one is only dedicated to their daily business because they don’t have many opportunities to network with new people.

Years and years, I have been receiving a lot of help from the Internet community in various forms: Forums, using free open source projects, becoming better by participating to various communities, educating myself, watching the improvement of commercial products because of the pressure of open source equivalent products, and more. I give back to the community by actively contributing and this makes me feel good. It also helps sustain the community and continue growing it.

This is going to be my second deed and I’ll keep posting any news that fall under this category.

DISCLAIMER: There are more ways and many situations that are not described here. This is only a note to self that may also be useful to you.

Pull from your remote repository to make sure everything is up to date

git pull origin master

Create a new local branch for keeping your changes way from your local master branch

git branch my_new_feature

Switch to that branch and start working

git checkout my_new_feature

After finishing work and running successfully any cukes/specs/tests, commit

git commit -am "Implemented my new super duper feature"

Then, switch back to local master and pull if you need to also merge any changes since you first pulled

git checkout master
git pull origin master

Merge the local feature branch to master and run any cukes/specs/tests and if everything passes push changes

git merge my_new_feature
git push origin master

This is my preference: I delete the temporary local branch when everything is merged and pushed

git branch -d my_new_feature

Update – Here is a more sophisticated approach: Agile git and the story branch pattern

$ git log

command doesn’t show the actual modified/added/deleted files. You can use the following command for that:

$ git log --pretty --stat

or

$ git log --pretty=format:"[%h] %ae, %ar: %s" --stat

I found the latter in one of Alex Young’s tweets.

If you have any favorite git log formats, please feel free to mention them in a comment.

For RSpec:

$ gem install rspec

For Cucumber:

$ gem install cucumber

Optionally, if you are on Windows, for color output you can also install Win32Console:

$ gem install win32console