SmallCruise Preview

While I work in many areas, from Agile coaching to Retrospective facilitation, for the past year in my spare time i’ve been revisiting my Smalltalk roots and giving Dolphin Smalltalk X6 a spin. When I first encountered Digitalk Smalltalk back in university, I was impressed with its purity but coming from a Turbo Pascal environment I found that little things drove me crazy - the inability to find things using wildcards (e.g. grep), the mass of windows. Little did I know at the time that implementing these things was trivial, and in fact modern environments like Dolphin do all of these things and more.

Anyway, I am enjoying writing things in my spare time with Dolphin - the environment is pure fun. That said, some things are still missing compared to some of the modern competition in C# and Java. Fortunately this time around I am more amenable to fixing some of the missing features. Earlier in the year I created Intelli-Dolphin, and my next project has been to integrate a Continuous Integration Environment by leveraging Cc.net.

While I’ve had it running for a while, and have been using it to test the version of Intelli-Dolphin, I finally decided it was time to record a screencast and see how well it hangs together. You can check out this flash file and see what you think.

During the week I’ll write up some proper instructions and launch it properly. That said, it’s now keeping me very honest having an automated build in Smalltalk that informs me if anything is broken when I check in.

I’m also thinking that by using Subversion, my dream of a DolphinMap list of applications available to just load into the image is potentially one step closer.

Knowing when to rest...

When you have a lot of ideas, it’s not always easy to know when its time to rest.

Recently a colleague asked me - “Are you feeling tired, and do you find yourself waking up early?” It was an innocent enough question, and it took me a while to digest the full conversation that we had, however his point was that he was concerned that maybe I needed a rest.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe it was time to take a break, and do something different for a while. I’m pleased to report that I did take some time to go to a warm place (Italy), do something different (start learning Italian), and rest (lie on a beach).

Now that I’m back, I realise that its important to notice when you are tired. More importantly, having friends that watch out for you is even more important.

The start ...

Having many thoughts, on many different topics poses interesting problems... Which idea's should I actively pursue? Which ideas should I leave to brew? Which are already implemented and good enough? I've procrastinated long enough, so this blog is an attempt to help me look beyond the bottom of my glass, and add some clarity to those ideas.