I went apartment-hunting this week. It’s tough. But it’s not as difficult as it could be. I’ve got craigslist in my pocket. Thanks, iPhone.
iPhone is not the first web-enabled phone I’ve used. But it’s the first phone that makes it seem natural. It’s not a matter of “Gee, look, I’m browsing the web on my phone.” I need answers, and the iPhone makes it easy to get at them, wherever I happen to be. And when I’m looking for an apartment, that’s all over the place.
The iPod wasn’t the first MP3 player, or even the first high-capacity MP3 player. But it was the first high-capacity MP3 player that people found usable. The iPhone presents a similar case.
There are plenty of gadgets that do what iPhone does: Not just browse the web, but send and receive email, manage your date book, and map out the neighborhood. Many of them are even phones. But up until now, they haven’t made it easy. They made it possible, but possible isn’t enough. Possible is for gadgets. And gadgets are for geeking out, not for getting things done.
Jason Fried of 37 Signals came to Providence the other day to speak to the Business Innovation Factory Summit. 37 Signals produces the Ruby on Rails software that powers BatchBook. We’re fans. Talking about 37 Signals’ design philosophy, Jason said that they try to avoid cluttering their applications with gratuitous functionality just to be “cool”. “Useful is cool” is their watchword.
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Tags: apple, BIF, BIF-3, iphone, jason fried, Ruby on Rails
Hello, my name is Sean Ransom and as the VP of Technology at BatchBlue, it’s my job to make the decisions in regards to the technology we use and how we use it. My goal with this blog is to share insights and ideas we find along the way as we develop the BatchBook product.
Today I want to talk about the cornerstone of our application: testing.
One of the great things about working for a brand new company is that you are starting with a clean slate. Ideas you had for previous projects that were impossible to shoehorn into the existing codebase or that were not in scope are now possible. One of these ideas has been Test Driven Development (TDD), a programming technique that enables the developer to define what the desired outcome will be before writing a line of code.
At my previous place of employment, unit testing was just not part of the culture. I was always of the impression that unit testing was a good idea but not effective in relation to time lost on a project writing tests. Boy, was that a misconception.
Fortunately, we’ve made a conscious decision to start writing tests from the start. Our framework of choice for the BatchBook is Ruby on Rails and the most excellent RSpec fits nicely into the Rails framework. At this time Rspec seems to be becoming the leader of Ruby testing frameworks and we really like it. Rspec uses a flavor of TDD called Behaviour Driven Development. The idea is that you define your test as an expectation of what your code should do and then you build to that specification.
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Tags: batchblue, Ruby on Rails, test driven development, virtual office
