Rabid Brains

Rails upgrades for beginners

Keeping your Rails applications up to date with the latest version of Rails and its supporting gems is best done in small increments, and frequently.

In the real world, you might be asked to upgrade a Rails app by two major versions. There are nuances to every major release and the best place to find this information is in the official Rails Guides. The general process however is quite methodical, diagrammable even! Clearing your console of deprecation warnings and changing test output from red to green is as pleasant as it sounds.

Fintech in Singapore

Last week I attended the Fintech Festival in Singapore. With over 25,000 attendees, it’s one of the largest financial technology events in the world, bringing together an impressive cross-section of enterprise, startups, and government. With funding from the MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore), plenty of sponsors, and ticket sales on top, it was certainly better funded than anything that is even possible in New Zealand. It was a fascinating reminder of how far New Zealand still has to go for us to be recognised for our technology rather than our sheep (one older lady at the conference literally made a sheep noise followed by a comment about hobbits when I told her I was from New Zealand).

Using AWS Lambda for DevOps and experimenting with 'serverless' reporting

This post is a bit of a geeky one - I hope it’ll be useful for you, even if you haven’t used AWS yet. This isn’t a technical deep dive post, but I hope I can sell you on the idea of adding reporting to your backups and tempt you to look at serverless hosting.

Agile Australia 17

Having recently come back from #AgileAus, I have been thinking about what I learnt and what actions I can take. It was a great conference, held in June at the Sydney Hilton with over 1200 Agilists attending. A nice surprise to see a large presence from some big banks and insurance companies who are newly implementing Agile. It was wonderful to have access to so many international speakers over a pretty intensive 2 day programme. I’ve been reviewing my notes in preparation for this blog, and there are some clear themes emerging: behaviour change, agile leadership and continuous learning.

The Points Don't Matter

The points don’t matter; if it sounds like a line from Whose Line Is It Anyway? that’s because it is.

When it comes to our Agile process, there’s one thing that is quite often misunderstood by everyone in the room: sizing.