Blog

The problem There’s just one tiny validation to add to a user model. The impact on the application code is small whereas the impact on the test code is enormous. The change takes a day to implement. The context A large code base, Rails 2....

I was talking to Matt Frank the other day and he mentioned something important - agile is all about feedback loops. I’ve been thinking and reading over this concept for a while now and I’ve come to the conclusion that feedback loops ar...

It is well known that about 50 years ago the first real computer programs started crawling out of the oceans… Even with all the improvements and accumulated knowledge that we have nowadays in our computer-based civilization, users have been...

The desire for a site re-design together with the difficulty of editing existing content prompted Channel 5 to commission a rebuild of their main website and a consolidation of their catch up service Demand 5 with the new site. Development kicked ...

For the last 12 months I have been immersed in an agile development environment which really follows the agile mantra, e.g. stand ups, pair programming, test driven development, 2 week iterations, retrospectives, refactoring, and the development w...

You’ve just done a new release. The Sales team find when they take a new customer’s details and hit ‘save’ they don’t end up on the place new order page, so they can’t make a sale! Which means they can’t g...

On Monday I was standing on a packed train looking out at a platform full of glum people expecting to be able to get on the train. No chance! At least I am slowly heading in the right direction unlike those poor people standing on a cold and wet p...

My last post was about pair programming. Recently I start working on a small project where I can’t pair with anyone. So I started thinking  “what could I use from pairing even When I’m not ? ”. My first thought was to...

 “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” Leonardo Da Vinci On my travels through cyberspace this week I hit upon this spooky website…  http://yvettesbridalformal.com/ It reminded me of a serious and consistent ...

Forget Pro-Plus or extra strong coffees, you don’t need this or a trip down to Spec-Savers to help keep focus.  The answer is agile. I’m not going to speak for other devs, but I have a seriously overactive mind.  Just as I g...

I have recently converted to iphone (‘about time’ I hear you say) and with that comes the many recommendations on apps. It was on a recent road trip with the family after the 100th ‘are we nearly there yet?’ that I succumbe...

Is there a disease called Waterfall Syndrome? I personally think we can see it taking hold in a number of large organisations. Companies should start to recognise it and help those who are suffering with the symptoms. I am sure that if we carried ...

I was wondering why a lot of people still don’t want to pair program. So I wrote down my most important reasons why you should pair program. Btw if you don’t know what pair programming is, here is the explanation. Faster learning - if...

We have just released a new version of our Planning Poker application for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. It wont cost you a penny as it is free. Planning Poker is an estimation tool used in the Agile methodology. Rather than asking a single dev...

We, the interns (Lawrence, Raunak and Andrew) have been here at Unboxed Consulting now for a little over 3 months. As a little introduction to ourselves and what we have learned, we felt a short blog article about our experience would be fitting. ...

We are heading into winter again already - where has the time gone?  We are all too often so busy with the day to day that we don’t find time to touch base with friends and colleagues of projects past (and hopefully projects future). So...

Developing for the iPhone can be quite fun. You get very mature frameworks to work with that do an extensive use of design patterns and you also get a fancy an highly tuned platform to play with. But there’s something I’m missing from...

AKA: Shameless Plug II. At Unboxed Consulting we have now been developing iPhone applications for 2 years. There is another post by Borja telling you the story about one of them. That was about an Enterprise application for a client. But we ...

When it comes to marketing your company, sometimes the same old-school avenues and techniques to achieve commercial success seem a bit tired and gauche within an increasingly savvy (and dare I say cynical) industry. So why not take a small risk an...

At Unboxed we also build iPhone applications. Our largest project so far has been inTouch, an application for a medical products sales company based in the US…This is the story of two men that crossed the pond with a mission; Attend the Cus...

As a programmer working with other programmers, I’m usually contributing to an already existing code base and basically just adding new functions or extending their functionality. Because I’m a person who could be influenced by others&...

Stuck in a project where every iteration fails to deliver? Where every retrospective is a nightmare? Where every show and tell is a verbal cat o’ nine tails session? Where you’re a gibbering wreck yearning for a stronger prescription? ...

It dawned on me this week that sometimes seeking out new business can be a bit like asking out a girl out on a hot date! Cold sweats, nervous shivers, butterflies in the stomach; a total nightmare… right?! This week I went along to the fre...

I was driving the family back from Lucca in Tuscany to catch our flight from Genova when a thought struck me. Car manufacturers segment their markets looking for large niches.  Large enough to attract enough customers worldwide but unique eno...

Yes that’s right, despite the fact that I’m employed by Unboxed I’m not working anymore. I’m going to work every day, programming some stuff but it’s not work for me anymore. Really. I have had this feeling since I s...

The default IRB completion code that ships with Ruby does not work well when being invoked from the debugger prompt: >: ruby /test_script.rb [-2, 7] in /test_script.rb 1 require 'ruby-debug' 2 debugger => 3 :foo /test_script.rb:3 :foo (...

This week I’ve been musing over the most expensive, and delayed record in music history, the (sort of) Guns n’ Roses album Chinese Democracy. ‘Sort of’ because it’s not really Gn’R at all, it’s the band&r...

As a ruby developer I’m used to using testing frameworks like Rspec or Cucumber. I started polishing an old project of mine recently, which is written in Ruby/js and using Sinatra. When I looked at the code I noticed that there is a lot of J...

I recently started a Rails 3 application to see how things are done in the new version, and also to take an opportunity to try Mongoid. After all, Rails now plays nicely with any library that implements ActiveModel.   The application i...

We have had a code review carried out on one of the projects we are currently working on, channel5.com, by an external party.  Xavier Noria has looked at the code and has given us a glowing report which Channel 5 are very happy with.&nbs...