Technovangelism

When working in a community that is constantly changing with new features coming out every week, there are a lot of different plugins, mini-frameowrks, and other packages that are worth using in your projects. One can spend more time researching new tools to use than doing actual work. One always hopes the time spent finding tools and frameworks to make development faster will make up for the time lost from not developing.

My latest research involved the testing frameworks for Rails. Although there are plenty of them out there, I focused on RSpec and Shoulda. Besides Test::Unit, they are the two biggest players in the Rails testing world. I could have spent weeks trying to figure out which best fit my needs, but I enforced some time-boxing on myself and refused to spend more than four hours on this. With so few hours to determine which framework is for me, I really focused on the parts that are most important to me. Within those few hours, I finally decided on Shoulda. RSpec may or may not have more momentum behind it, but Shoulda fits the way I think and is (hopefully) the best solution right now.

When evaluating frameworks or plugins for yourself, always remember to time-box. Choosing the right one is certainly important, but spending the right amount of time choosing is just as important. You have to have time before you can start saving it.

In my latest attempt to fight burnout, I began experimenting with iPhone development. Joining the developer program was no sweat and there are plenty of articles and tutorials online to help you get coding. But the biggest problem when learning a new language or framework is knowing what to code. Building a Hello World application is great and all, but it hardly teaches you anything you want to learn.

My process for solving this perpetual dilemma is to build something that I actually need or want. For my iPhone project, I chose a Power Hour application. Before deciding this was the right project, I had searched for one in the App Store and was unsuccessful. This either means Apple is against such an app (unlikely), or no one has though of it yet. Either way, it is a simple enough that I can code it within a day, and it will teach me far more about iPhone development than a brief tutorial. Unfortunately, getting the app to my iPod Touch requires it to be put in the App Store which requires a $99 fee. Perhaps others would be willing to pay $0.99 for such an app and could cover the cost for me?

Before the iPhone app was started, I wrote a version in javascript as I had an emergency need for one. Feel free to enjoy an hour of it.