Adaptive, Iterative and Agile Development is Fantastic
The ability to work in short bursts of agility leads to amazing results. The ability to quickly adapt to changing needs brings satisfaction. The ability to combine all of these with Ruby on Rails makes for a happy developer. Adaptive, iterative and agile development with ruby on rails is fantastic!
What I Want Right Now
When I “launched” this blog a few weeks ago I had the ability to create categories and write posts. That’s it. No comments, no tags (still don’t have those) no permalinks, no photos no nothing. Just a really simple system of posting in various categories. This was fine for a while, but I wanted more. So, as time permitted I slowly added new features. Here’s a rough timeline with some made-up version numbers
1.0 - posts and categories 1.1 - user accounts 1.2 - polished admin interface 1.3 - permalinks 1.5 - comments 1.6 - admin comments 1.7 - new comment notifications 1.8 - photos
Together these would have taken a while, but as separate pieces they were simple digestible easy to complete tasks, perfect for my workflow.
Ship It, LDO
I would have loved to have all of these things and more when I launched originally but it wasn’t in my time budget so I had to break it up this way. I just needed to get something up and running, so I went with the most basic of basics. Turns out, I found some things that I could do with out right away (tags, search, ratings) and found some things that I wanted (permalinks, comments, photos). Everything bubbled up according to it’s importance and so far everything feels just right. When it doubt, just ship it. Like duh, obviously.
Rails Tie-In
If you haven’t realized quite yet, Ruby on Rails makes this agile/iterative approach super easy. Between migrations, built-in helpers and BDD I was able to add all of this new functionality piece by piece knowing that I wasn’t going to break anything I already had. Plus it didn’t take very long (learning curve not withstanding).
In a world dictated by client requests and boss-based to-do’s I don’t often get the chance to work like this, but for now I’m cherishing every moment.
