Sayings I use, only some of which are actually originally attributable to me. Anyone with research on a saying's provenance, feel free to comment. This page, unlike a normal blog entry, will be updated as needed with stuff I find myself saying with air quotes.

A comment is a lie waiting to happen.

"Legacy" means any program that people are actually using.

(Feathers: "Legacy" means "no tests.")

If you try hard enough, you can make anything fail.

There's no such thing as human error. (Only system error.)

If you pay attention to something, it gets better.

It's always a people problem. (Jerry Weinberg)

You can see a lot by looking. (Yogi Berra)

Yogi wrote a book called "You Can Observe A Lot By Watching" but I prefer to think he was misquoting himself.

Language Log has a take on this quote: She was seeing at me

Object-Oriented Programming is like teenage sex: everyone says they're doing it; few actually are; and those who are rarely know what they're doing. (Anonymous, via Misko)

Here's a simple test for whether you're doing it right: Is your data in the same class as the methods accessing it? Oh, really? Check again.

Double negatives are not unconfusing.

Good Scrum diagram. Suitable for XP too (replace "sprint" with "iteration" and "daily scrum" with "daily standup").

Courtesy of Mountain Goat Software

• iPhone on Rails - Creating an iPhone optimised version of your Rails site using iUI and Rails 22

• DHH's official announcement of Rails 2.0
• Ben's Rails 2 Upgrade Notes
• Ryan's Feature Summary

Again, thanks to Steve.

"So, who needs a pair?"

(See also Bush Violates Standup Rules)

(6:30 pm: updated to use mysqldump) (12/14/07: updated to remove db:reset since the Rails 2.0 version now does something different.) (12/15/07: updated to not set ENV['RAILS_ENV'] since that gets passed down to child processes)

There was an old hacker who lived in a shoe; she had so many migrations she didn't know what to do. Every time her build ran clean, she spent a whole minute staring at the screen.

Fortunately, she read this blog post and now her db:setup task is so fast she's started building multiple test environments so she can run tests in parallel!