Quiet, busy and holidays are waiting... and Ruby

Hi there, I haven't been around here for the last two months. I've had some great post-initiatives about SOA and related items but they are still unpublished. I didn't have the time to complete them.

Now I'm one day away from a holiday. I'll of course enjoy the free time without obligations but next to that I will improve my Ruby skills. Being a consultant/architect for nearly a decade I didn't really do any programming or development myself. But Ruby got my real attention more then a year ago and I'd like to be able to create solutions or applications in between my others tasks. Or for real (temporary) use.

One of the noticeable things is that Sun/Java is playing a bigger role in the Ruby world. Since about 2 years Sun hired a few smart guys to build a Ruby interpreter for the JVM/Java Virtual Machine (more info here). They already did a very great job but now I really believe in a nice Ruby future... Ruby on the JVM is about the fastest implementation around (see The Great Ruby Shootout, dec. 2008). We already knew that Java's performance is incredibly good, but as a platform for interpreted languages the JVM does a very good job again. So I'm very enthousiastic about JRuby.

Last year I did a Java + JRuby based project for Studielink (more). With a 2,5 man team (I was the 0,5 man ScrumMaster) we did a very good job within 2 months. About a year later I still have the feeling we out-performed ourselves. Thanks to a great team and great technology, we did the job. Even afterwards, sometimes a bug is found or a new small feature is requested. These are found, solved and deployed most of the time within one or a few hours after we started the task. That's what I call AgileMore!

The nature of that specific application enables direct deployment, I know and understand that is not always an option. But if it is, we can! Just like most successful internet initiatives, eg YouTube about daily adapted the features to provide more and better services and functionality continouosly.

Maybe I'll come up with some Ruby news the coming days/weeks. My blogging intention for 2009 is to post more regularly at least weekly. More Agile news, insight, SOA, etc. Hope to see you here!

Have a nice Christmas!