The next 10,000 hours

I’m blogging about this because the second time I needed to make a mail shortcut, I couldn’t remember how – so if I blog it, I can always come here when I need to do it again!

I’m using a couple of different applications that allow you to update them by e-mail – mostly, task management apps. I’m teetering between using Remember the Milk and Runway to manage my to-do tasks. Both of them have nice web interfaces, but adding a new idea/task via a web interface is a hassle – you have to be online, and you need to use a Browser UI – and even though both have nice mobile UIs, they are overkill for just adding a new “to be categorised” item.

Thankfully, both have magic e-mail addresses that can receive tasks as mail. And on an Android phone, it’s very simple indeed to fire off a new mail – you can compose an e-mail and hit “send” or “save as draft”, and when the phone next syncs mail, it’ll be sent or put into your ‘drafts’ folder on gmail. Sure, you can do the same with a standalone app such as Astrid, or the RTM-specific Android app (which I’ve never tried), but again, for basic “I need to remember this” tasks, a full app is overkill; and while Astrid will auto-sync, I trust the Gmail auto-sync rather more!

Anyway, to the shortcut business. Rather than loading up the whole gmail client every time, you can simply make a desktop shortcut which loads the “Compose Mail” interface. (Note, I have a HTC Hero, which has HTC’s custom Sense UI, so some of this may not apply to non-Sense phones). The steps are as follows:

1. Add the mail address to your gmail contacts, however you like (I use a desktop web browser generally, why bother doing this on the phone? Just add the contact in gmail, and wait for it to sync to the phone’s contacts list)
2. On the phone, press the “+” button on the bottom-right of the screen, or however you add icons in your Android OS
3. Select “Shortcut” (not “widget”, strangely)
4. Select “Person”
5. Choose the newly added contact
6. Select “send mail” – and a “send mail to XXX” icon will be put on your desktop

If you find you have a lot of shortcuts, it’s well worth putting them in folders – I have a folder called “Planning” that has my “send to RTM” shortcut, plus bookmarks for the web interface, links to google calendar, etc.

Note this is also how you make a shortcut to send a SMS or to call a person. Very handy for quick contacts for loved ones!

Well, having played with CoffeeScript for a few days, I think it’s a wonderful thing – but for the moment, at least, I’m going back to JavaScript, with some regret.
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I’ve been fiddling with Coffeescript, a nifty language for writing Javascript – well, really it’s more like a pre-compiler than a language; it compiles directly to readable javascript (including comments!) and generally one Coffeescript statement produces one javascript statement.

So why would you use it? Because it bypasses some of the horribleness of Javascript syntax, and implements a few handy patterns, like anonymous function creation, in much clearer code.
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This isn’t particularly new – I wrote this code a while ago, but it never got “finished” so I never wrote it up…

Many agile dev teams use Delcom USB build lights:
http://delcomproducts.com/productdetails.asp?productnum=804005

Coding for these is apparently quite complex… unless you are on a recent-ish Linux machine, in which case it’s amazingly trivial.
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[Please note - if you are familiar with BDD, Cucumber, or Selenium, parts of this may be a tad basic - but I thought it was worth writing a from-scratch guide for those to whom this is unfamiliar territory...]

What is Behaviour Driven Development?

BDD is a new-ish term used as a contrast to Test Driven Development – it was coined by Dan North in 2006, as described in his article at http://dannorth.net/introducing-bdd – there’s also a good introduction in wikipedia.

In a nutshell, BDD is all about describing the behaviour of an application, in a plain-text language that can be understood by end users, testers, and developers – and then hopefully automating acceptance testing, so you can prove that at any time, the application meets the BDD description.
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