richiekhoo

This April I've joined Supermarket Free Month and am pledging to go Supermarket Free for a whole month.

It's going to be inconvenient to start with. It's true that it's so easy to just get stuff on demand from my local Supermarket. 

Where am I going to go now to get all the mindless basics of running my life, my groceries, my meat and of course all my toiletries and what about stuff I use that I'm not even aware of, what if I forget about something that I can only get from the supermarket!! What then?

Well that's exactly the point. Really it's not about avoiding the supermarket, it's really about shopping local. 

The mega-chains have encouraged us to forget the seasons we live in, since being back in the city, I'm loosing touch. Having watermelons on display as we hit winter is not helping things.

So far since taking the pledge, I've already discovered my local farmers market (look, we've only just moved up here), we've worked out where we can get locally grown meat and even found a novel way to buy toilet paper. whogivesacrap.org? well now, it seems, I do.

I think as a society we're sick of seeing local businesses shutting down around us, wondering where we can find jobs and putting up with stupidity from mega-corporations. 

For me it's about living healthy, supporting local shops & producers and actively questioning my consumption habits.

Recently, project catalyst Lucy Chan explained on ABC radio why she started supermarket free month. It's worth a listen.

I encourage you to join me and take the pledge and go supermarket free this April. I'm pretty sure latecomers are welcome too.

To find out more and to make the pledge visit supermarketfree.org.

In 2013 I'm taking my family on a big trip around Australia.

Roughly where we've been to date

So far it's been far more adventure than your average holiday. With a 4WD and a Jayco Swan pop up trailer we've seen more of Australia than most.

It's been one of the most awesome experiences of my life and really great to do with kids.

Last week I was on 'Radio Adelaide' talking about an event I'm running called 'Trampoline Adelaide', a day to come & share what you find Amazing.

To listen to the audio follow the link and press the orange play button.

This week I ran a workshop 'Test Driven Development Transformed' for my local ruby programming meetup AdelaideRb.

The session was well received and one participant even said it was one of the most fun tech talks he'd been to. I was very happy to get such positive feedback for a technical workshop!

Many of my ideas were inspired by the work of Uncle Bob Martin, Kent Beck and Corey Haines who recently key noted Australia's first ruby conference RubyConfAU.

Here are my slides.

As part of my talk I took Uncle Bob's fantastic concept of Transformations and his 'Transformation Priority' premise (TPP) and in an attempt to make it easier for participants, put together a cheetsheet which included examples of each premise as I understood them.

Everyone loved the cheetsheet and I had repeated requests for me to put it up somewhere. So here tis!

And here's a white version of the TPP Cheatsheet.

Love to hear your thoughts and how you go playing with these new Specification Driven Design ideas.

Further Resources

Extending Red, Green, Refactor with Expected

* http://richiekhoo.com/post/49820134249/extending-red-green-refactor-with-expected

Corey Haines Roman Numerals Kata

* http://programmingtour.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/roman-numerals-kata-with-commentary.html

Transformation Priority Premise (Uncle Bob)

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transformation_Priority_Premise

Facilitator Resources

Workshop Starting Point Project File for Participants

THE PATH TO GREEN DOESN'T ALWAYS START WHERE YOU EXPECT

In Test Driven Development the standard approach is to use the process Red, Green, Refactor.

Where we spend most of our time as developers is getting from Red to Green.

I'm here to propose a mini step along the way, a waypoint if you like, on the way from Red to Green.

Introducing 'Expected'.

Expected is a way point on the journey from red to green in the red/green/refactor cycle of test driven development.

First we write a failing test to get to Red.

    describe "User" do

        it "has a first name" do

            user = FactoryGirl.create(:user)

            user.first_name.should == "Maddy"

       end

    end

If we were pairing and I turned to you and said "We haven't written any code yet, will this test pass?"

The obvious answer is NO. 

Of course this code doesn't pass, we've just taken the first step, 'Write a failing test' and the test fails.

If I then asked you, "What error do you expect?", if you were just focused on the 'it' statement, you might say, well our user has no first name so I would expect a method error that say something like method first_name does not exist.

Corey Haines referred to the clean state of a failing test as getting to a position where the test starts off returning nil as a nice simple starting point.[1]

Unfortunately when we run this test we could get all sorts of unintended errors that come up:

gem rspec needs to be installed

stack overflow error in line 55 of some unrelated thing

Class User does not exist

Factory Girl Factory for user not present

(hopefully you get the idea)

In a large existing code base we could be wrangling with all sorts of stray errors before we finally get to somewhere we expect.

In a large code base we could stray a long way from the red/green/refactor path before we finally get back on track and actually getting anywhere near adding the code that adds the functionality implied by the test.

The point that we get back on the path is the point when the error that the test reports is the error that we expect the test to report. This is the Expected Failure.

Unfortunately we don't currently have simple language to describe a test failing just because the project has larger issues vs when the test is failing as expected.

This is a valuable moment. Often when pairing with another developer after spending a bunch of time off the path resolving unexpected test failure cases, there is a little moment of celebration when we get back on the path, when we achieve the expected failure.

I'm naming this point and calling it EXPECTED, being short for 'Expected Failure' or even 'Expected State'.

You write a test and start out at RED then the next step is to get to EXPECTED, the tests are still red but at Expect it's the RED that you want!

From EXPECTED being the expected failure state then it's much more fun to head towards green, here every step you are taking is more likely a step forward up the path.

Here you are going from EXPECT to GREEN.

RED -> EXPECTED -> GREEN -> REFACTOR

Ever gone to search for an email to complete a task and then got sidetracked reading through your inbox?

It's an anti-pattern that I call distracting setup.

Distracting setup is any structure you have around you which generates distraction from what you are wanting to achieve.

On analysis I realised that the distracting setup was that my email client (Gmail) always defaulted to show me my inbox on opening.

The solution is just to have gmail open to an essentially blank page, then I could choose what to do from there. Ironically, this is the same logic behind Google's uncluttered google.com home page.

From a blank start page I could then choose what to do first; search emails, read inbox, read starred/todo items, check sent items. Basically I could get onto whatever task I came for without misdirection and distraction.

Gmail doesn't provide a blank start page so I figured out a simple solution.

1. Create a label called 'start'.

2. Jump to the folder and drag the link into my bookmarks toolbar.

3. Right click, edit and rename the bookmark to just say 'Gmail start'

BAM, now when I click to check my gmail I end up at my empty start folder and can then choose what next from there.

Go ahead, make your own little start page hack now!

20 years ago today the ruby programming language was created by Matz in Japan. 

Ruby is special for many reasons but most of all what I think makes it special was Matz objective for creating the language,

"I hope to see Ruby help every programmer in the world to be productive, and to enjoy programming, and to be happy. That is the primary purpose of Ruby language"

Ruby has definitely bought happiness to my life and has enabled me work every day in a programming language that I love.

Technically I love ruby for it's elegance.

Personally I love ruby the most for it's community just as 'Matz is Nice so We are Nice', I have found the rubyists I meet friendly, welcoming and helpful.

In 2011 I helped create and found Ruby Australia. This week just been, Ruby Australia organised and ran Australia's first ever ruby conference (RubyConfAU). Thanks so much to all the amazing organisers and speakers. It was a proud moment for me to see so many amazing people come together for conference and to watch the community growing and flourishing before my eyes.

It feels kinda special, and very like Matz, that Ruby 2.0 would be released today on Ruby's 20th birthday.

image source: trextrying.tumblr.com

There's a lure to big upfront design.

I've done it so many times myself, standing in front of a empty whiteboard I've worked with many teams to start to imagine and cook up the future. I believe this process is healthy, but one of the temptations is that if you just planned 'enough' you could eliminate all problems and everything would just tick along. Sometimes things work this way, often they don't. For highly stable processes, upfront planning works surprisingly well. Take conference and event planning for example. The process of organising a conference really benefits from some solid up front planning. Beyond that being organised is just starting early enough before the event, having the organising team meet regularly and ticking off key tasks as they come up. Running a conference flow though is different, ideating involved lots of mental thrashing and brain popping and chucking bad concepts and ideas out.

Switching context between many unrelated tasks is one of the surest ways to loose productivity. 

When you want to work effectively on a task, a single task, context is important. You need to know what you need to do, have just the tools around you that can help you do the job and (mental) space to just focus on the task at hand.

Email sucks at helping you get to a focussed mental nirvana. Everything else is in your face vying for attention while you desperately try to focus and get just that first task done first.

Tools that help you separate workload along different context facilitate productivity.

When I use a project tracking system to track work projects, a big part of the benefit I get is that a particular work project is the only context visible within the tool. We often forget this focussing instead on all the cool things the tool does. So often we are up in arms, oh I wish everything was in one place, when in fact your brain would thank you if you did keep things a little more separate.

Mental isolation of tasks is critical.

We love to open new boxes and read new things but our brain is notoriously bad at closes boxes. Like that email you read while on holidays that you should just have not read and left closed, suddenly a perfect relaxed poolside afternoon becomes a sea of worry as you just can't forget what you had read.

Respect your need to separate communications between different context. Minimise your email intake. Use email responsible.

Edit: Adelaide's first Trampoline was a great success, I've updated relevant sections to now refer to Trampoline 2 coming on Sunday 26 May 2013.

Some of you know I uprooted my family and we took an adventure across to Melbourne, Australia for over a year.

What you may not know is that while I was there I went to a bunch of things and probably one of the best things I discovered in Melbourne was Trampoline Day. 

I'm writing today to invite you to a special day, 'Trampoline Adelaide' on Sunday 26 May 2013.

Trampoline is a day where everyone comes and shares what they find amazing. The day is unlike anything you have likely ever done before, the day starts with everyone gathered in a big open space and there is this huge grid painted on the wall.

THE GRID: At the start of the day it's blank - The participants set the agenda for the day.

When it starts the organisers then ask who has something amazing they want to talk about? 

After a moment of expectant hesitation and silence the very first person puts up their hand and say something like 'Id like to talk about.. 'how we could all communicate if we all didn't talk, not with sign language but just with our innate body language, my sessions is called Talking with your Body' or some other fascinating topic.. .. and then its on!

  The board then fills quickly with people coming forth from the crowd and then it just starts when it starts and suddenly there are all these cool sessions you can go to.

It's open and freeing and there is this law of two feet which means that if you are not getting anything out of a session you literally should get up and go to a different session and it's not rude, it's how the day is meant to work, and as a speaker it's great because the only people there are the ones that want to be there :)

Well since coming back to Adelaide I speak to soo many people and there is all this cool stuff you are all doing around SA but I feel like people never really hear about most of it. Trampoline is awesome because all these people come from all walks of life for a day and just share what they find most awesome and most intriguing. You don't have to give a talk, but by the end of the day you'll probably want to.

My friend Dee is an author, here's me hosting a session asking 'What is the future of the Book?' (I asked, they answered).

I'm helping bring Trampoline to Adelaide and I'd really love it if you can come along and also bring a friend with you, maybe someone curious about life too, maybe someone who doesn't know me (or they can know me whatevz). You don't have to listen to me talk, in fact I really just want to hear what everyone else is up to!

You don't have to give a talk, but maybe, just maybe, have a think about what you would like to talk about.

Tickets are currently free and available from trampolineday.com.

I encourage you to grab a free ticket today and join the discussions over on the facebook page.

So, grab your free ticket here and I'd love it if you could help me spread the word.

Hope to see you there!

Richie

Ps. Here's a video in which some Melbourne peeps explain why they love Trampoline.

Pps. Aaaaand you can invite friends via facebook here or tweet @trampolineday.

Sometimes you know it'll be crappy but you still have to go with it

For the longest time I have never written a blog or been comfortable to post long articles online. I personally feel my writing is probably not good enough.

This month I'm working on building up my blogging skills and stamina by blogging every day. 

It's painful to get to the end of the day and have to commit my writing to be published. It's much safer just to leave the article in 'draft'.

Also there's the issue of publishing something and then being like woah this is really average, I wish I could polish it more, maybe it needs 3 more revisions and a few friends to look it over. But with a daily challenge and the rest of my life still continuing regardless, I don't have that luxury.

Sometimes I'm just not going to be happy with what I write. Sometimes it'll be crap.

So my question is, how crap can my blog be? How crap is it ok for it to be. I'm always wanting to share what I'm learning, is it enough that people get the jist of it and maybe a few links to take away?

I don't know the answer, but posting every day is definatley helping and I suppose like the rest of the internet, if the content is no longer relevant, or interesting, just click along to somewhere else :)

For a while now I've been looking into the best ways for kids to learn to code. 

I thought I'd share the journey we've been on in case others are interested to teach kids to code or even just wanting to dabble with programming themselves from the more approachable end of things. 

Technology is not always a good thing for young children, but somewhere from age 9-14 I think many kids are probably ready to have a go at programming a computer.

My son is currently 10 years old and it's been great to watch him pick up coding.

Originally I was out to find the perfect language for him to learn.

The Ruby Rogues podcast recently had a great discussion on which languages are best to learn first and why. http://rubyrogues.com/039-rr-programming-language-fundamentals

Their conclusion is that it's actually really useful to play with and try learning a bunch of languages. Im starting to see the wisdom in it.

Here's what we've had a go at so far.

Ruby

We started with Hackety Hack ("Hackety Hack will teach you the absolute basics of programming from the ground up. No previous programming experience is needed!)".

HacketyHack provides it's own text editor as part of the system, when my son started to hit the edges of hacketyhack, I installed the Sublime text editor on our old windows PC and he had a go at shoes.  "Shoes is a cross-platform toolkit for writing graphical apps easily and artfully using Ruby."

HTML & CSS

We had a go at some Basic HTML with a little CSS but at 9 yo he was finding the CSS bit too abstract to get anywhere beyond basic HTML for the moment.

Javascript

codecademy.com - We had a go at codecademy, but despite me loving it, he got a bit bored with it. I think what seems to work well for kids is environments where there is a graphical interface. For adults I'd definatley recommend codeacademy as a stop along the way.

MIT Scratch (Visual programming environment)

He actually really enjoyed Scratch, in a way it's like a powerful programming orientated version of microsoft powerpoint. You drag objects onto the screen and then build lego type blocks together to reflect what you want everything to do.

I think as a tool, it's great for kids to find a passion for and immediate success in telling the computer what to do. The results are immediate and visual and something even grandma appreciates when you show her. 

I think it's been good to teach him the basics of loops and variables, at 9 years old loops were a little tricky, post some Scratch time he's now back into ruby and knows when he wants a loop but is still getting confient how to write the syntax himself.

I think Scratch is a worthy stopping point along the way but not a long run solution, after a while he started to just browse the games the other kids had made more than make anything and that's when I started to think he's ready for the next challenge.

SmallTalk

For a long time now I've heard many people talk about how SmallTalk was this amazing visionary language and bought about many of the innovations we now take for granted in modern programming languages. Languages such as Ruby and ObjectiveC (which is used for programming Mac's and iPhones) draw much from SmallTalk.

When one of the Ruby Rogues made a comment to the effect, 'No language is perfect, except maybe Small Talk', this was enough for me to finally decide to give it a go. One thing that is interesting about SmallTalk is that it's like installing a mini virtual machine on your computer, it comes with it's own desktop and Graphical Interface and desktop and the programing process is actually quite visual. 

Id recommend everyone read this amazing article, 'Design Principles Behind Smalltalk' and check out SmallTalk.

So that's where we are at. We've just found this SmallTalk tutorial to build a graphical game using Test Driven Development! So I'm off to build a game!

It's fun checking out different languages, I encourage you to do the same!

Recently the amazing Jacqui Hocking told me she was boarding a boat and sailing for days and days with a family which is navigating the world and raising awareness for climate change with school children and communities. It's a bold an inspiring adventure and well worth checking out! (The project is called TopToTop)

One thing she was a little unsure about, was spending days and days at sea with young children. Like many Gen Y's, most of us don't see a lot of little people these days.

Well as a young father with two young kids I gave her a few tips and I thought I'd pass them along today.

First up a scenario:

Lets say we went for a coffee together and during our time together deliberately lent across and just out of nowhere took a big sip of YOUR coffee!

Let's freeze there right on that moment.

In the Waldorf philosophy there is the concept of 'Head, Heart and Hands', it reflects that you essentially go through this process: 

As an adult you observe what happened and then start running that against your existing mental model (Head), then you see how you feel about it (Heart) then you take action (Hands).

I'd imagine you would think, this is totally weird, Im not sure I like him drinking my coffee it's mine afterall and then you would take action and do who knows what!

For a child they don't come prebuilt with this existing mental schema to reference they are literally undertaking experienments and building up the schema as they go.

In fact it's Hands, Heart, Head for children.

They do something (Hands), see what happens and then work out how they feel (Heart) about it, then based on how the feel about it they store away new concepts and ideas (Head).

Children act with their hands & bodies first then work out what it all means afterwards

So how does this all help?

In short, children live more inside the right brain, inside the world of imagination and creativity until around age 7-8.

Exciting imagination is a sure way to engage kids and keep the exicted in what you are up to.

As I suggested to Jacqui, maybe just lean over the edge of the boat from time-to-time and exclaim 'OH I think that fish just winked at me, did you see that?'. 

Consider 'Nicky, get in the Car!' along side 'Quick everyone in the spaceship we're about to take off!  Ok Nicky make sure you seal the air lock, lets Go Go Go!'

The second approach is so effective with kids, it almost feels too easy.

The problem is as adult that we love living in the word of concepts and ideas, and it takes a little effort to switch into creative mode.

This creative mode though is generally a good place to be for many different reasons, just ask Sir Ken Robinson.

Oh and crouch down to their level when you say 'Hi' and when you tell stories to kids make people animals, and but that's for another day..

Thanks for reading!

This month I'm taking Steve Hopkins 30 day blog post challenge.

I've always want to be a blogger and have read countless articles on how to get started and what to do. I suppose as a bit of a perfectionist I'm always seeking the perfect post to make before pushing it out to 'publish'.

What runs through my head is just general thoughts of inadaquacey around my words and how they never come across as cleanly as I wish they would.

Will I offend people? Will people misunderstand? Does anyone really want to read about what I have to say?

I've been thinking recently that it would be good if blogging had a Learner Plates system like when you get your drivers license, then it would be clear for new readers that you are just starting out.

"Watch out ahead this guys still on his L Plates, you may need to cut them some slack"

Maybe we need L Plates for more things in life

I think Learners Plates is a good analogy for blogging, it lets people know you are starting out are less confident and lets them know not to expect you to be going at full speed.

So as of today, Im bringing my blog out of the driveway and for the month of March will be driving it around with my L Plates on!

Often I tell people Im a founder of AngelCube a Melbourne based startup incubator and people say "What's that?". Here I attempt to explain.

In a nutshell what we do is help tech founders launch their products into the world arena.

Twice a year applications open and at our last intake we had over 150 teams apply.

We then select four of them and then work intensively with the founders over a 3-6 month period to launch their product, get customers on board and finally have investors lining up to put some funds in as the product takes off.

I love this kind of work. Apart from the fact that it leverages two of my great passions, tech and business it also fits well with my deep desire to empower others.

To add some skin to the game and attract the best teams, we offer them $20,000 for a 10% share in their business. Not all startups will do well but when one does, the gains pay for all the effort involved in helping the others. It's win-win and I love it!

It's not alot of money but it's designed to be just enough for someone with a good idea and a bit of traction to go hell, why don't I just give this thing a real go.

In addition to the funding the startups also get access to an invaluable group of mentors, and access to intimate sharing sessions with mentors throughout the program.

Driving our approach are hugely successful accelerators like TechStars and the company that started it all YCombinator, both based in the US.

You don't need to have a IT startup though to start playing this game, Eric Reise who coined the term 'lean startup' has developed an approach and a set of principals for creating a successful global product starting with any idea. It's based on stating your assumptions as hypothesis and taking a more scientific approach to finding out if customers like your idea.

I encourage anyone who has ideas they desire to turn into successful businesses to read Eric's book The Lean Startup.

The world is shifting and the platform is there for anyone to take their ideas and make the next global business.