Who is I?

Want to take a new look at news feeds? Whoisi is a feed aggregator with a few distinctive features, firstly it is orientated around people, secondly it allows you to associate an individual with pretty much anything that provides an RSS feed, it is also an experiment with anonymous collaboration.

News feeds are organised around people (e.g. John Resig) and for people who just have one blog it isn’t very exciting but if someone has a Twitter stream, a blog or two, Flickr and a LiveJournal then suddenly you are looking at a consolidated view of everything that person is up to.

Which is either really cool or is the behaviour of a demented stalker. For people who have a strong web presence and are generally pretty cool and interesting then it is really useful to get a single view of them. For example John’s JQuery conference posting works better when you combine Twitter and the photostream.

I think I kind of prefer Whoisi’s liberal anarchy to most of the other sites I have seen. It asks important questions as to how the web should work. Why do we need accounts and passwords? If information is public then do individuals get a say in how they information they provide is organised?

Aftermath of a Geek Night

Last night was my first Geek Night at ThoughtWorks. There have been many Geek Nights but this was the first under the management of Paul Nasrat and myself.

I was pretty happy with the evening and I think both speakers and audience came away pretty happy too, which is great. Paul and I will be reviewing the feedback from the event before the next one on the 12th of June.

I learned about State machine support in JMock, something I have never used despite having used the framework a lot. The audience also go to see how Nat and Steve think JMock tests should look. It made me realise that I have tended to set assertions in my mocks rather than using stubs in the past. Well no more! Allowing is my new friend.

During the dojo I also got to do a segment on a classic refactoring of a block of code to a method, to a method in a private class, to a private class implementing an interface, to a collaborator decoupled by an interface. It is a classic technique (and you will be able to see it in the dojo code when it gets posted this weekend) and seeing it put to use by Nat, who is a great developer and someone who really loves to code, was very cool. It was an experience I genuinely felt privileged to be part of and I hope the other people in the pairs felt the same.

I would also hope that it illustrates how mocking should lead to changes in design of objects rather than “pickling” their behaviour at a certain point in time.

Rhino on Rails

I really couldn’t believe this when I heard it but the video is worth watching. It still seems insane but Steve Yegge makes a good case and it sounds like the kind of technical project that anyone would love tackling.