How to write a Ruby-related book - the tools

I have recently published the 1.0 release of the "Rails Refactoring: Rails Controllers" book. It took me over 1 year since I started. Over the time, I've experimented with many tools which helped me along the way.

This post is a summary of some of the tools.

The short version

iaWriter for the initial writing
vim/sublime for editing
LeanPub for PDF/epub/mobi generation
Github for storing the source files (markdown)
DPD for selling
MailChimp for email list
Trello for task management

The longer version

After I knew what to write about (the process how I came up with the "idea" is another topic - let me know if you're interested in reading about it) - I've had a bunch of notes, scattered across many tools - Evernote, Hackpad, MindNode, code repositories.

Despite all the temptations, I didn't try to find the best tool for writing. I know myself and that would result in endless experiments without any delivery. Obviously, there was a temptation to write such tools on my own. I'm very happy I didn't go this way.

The minimal requirements was to have a tool that generates a PDF.

Kitabu

The first tool that seemed to be good enough was  kitabu. It was a good tool - think Rails but for books, a whole framework.
They even give you the familiar "$ kitabu new mybook" tool.

Kitabu was a very programmer-friendly approach.

I eventually gave up on Kitabu. The problem was with the commercial PDF tool (PrinceXML) which is used by default. I was OK with paying for good software, but at that time, the license was about $2,000 which was a bit too high.

Scrivener

Then I switched to Scrivener. I loved this tool. I found it through some "real" writers forum. It's very popular among writers. It's a desktop app. It's great for notes collection, structuring, drafting. It's good at WYSIWYG. It has a built-in PDF generation. It supports export/import from markdown.

At some point, more people from my team started to help mi with the book. The Scrivener approach wasn't very team-friendly (or I wasn't able to use it). No easy way of two-way sync with markdown. Other people would have to be forced to use Scrivener as well. Also, it wasn't very version-control-friendly.

Leanpub

Meanwhile, Robert Pankowecki (with a little bit of my help) was working on the Developers Oriented Project Management book. He used Leanpub and this tool was very team-friendly. There was a repo, we could all contribute into. It generates PDF/mobi/epub (on their servers) via a Github hook.

The Github repo:

(as you see there were 300 commits so far and 13 people contributed to the book!)

I was sceptical at first, as they (at least at that time) didn't give emails from the book readers. I found it very limiting for marketing/sales activities. However, LeanPub lets you generate the PDF and take the files with you to sell somewhere else. That sounded perfect to us.
Over the last year, I've seen how Leanpub (the UI) keeps getting better. I may seriously consider switching to them as the selling tool as well at some point. They now also have an iOS app for reading your books.
So far, we're staying with Leanpub for our books (the third one is in progress).

My book is very code-heavy. LeanPub is great for it. They not only support syntax highlighting but they also let us present nicely the diff between two pieces of code.

One minor issue with Leanpub is that you need to wait for the PDF generation (30-60 seconds). I usually work locally, do frequent commits to the local repo. Every now and then I push to the github repo. This triggers a hook, which notifies Leanpub. After a while, I launch a simple bash script  - download_and_preview.sh - which downloads the newest PDF and opens Preview on my Mac (if it's already open then it reloads the file). This is a good-enough flow.

iaWriter

Leanpub lets me write in MarkDown. For some time, I've used vim for that. After a while, I realized that there are two aspects of writing. When I write the initial version of a chapter I need a full focus to let the flow work. iaWriter is a perfect tool for distraction-free writing, with a beautiful full-screen mode. This is where I do most of my initial writing.

When the draft of the chapter is ready, I need to do more editing (it's like refactoring but for normal text). This is when I usually launch either vim or sublime. The vim shortcuts lets me do editing faster.

When I'm done and ready for a new release of the book, I run the 'release' script:

This created a capistrano-like directory and creates a new .zip file.

DPD

I use the DPD system for selling. Unfortunately, they don't have the API to automatically upload a new .zip file and manually change the product configuration. I hate this part, as it's very error-prone. I even attached the wrong file to the wrong product once.

As for payments, DPD only supports PayPal (at least for a Polish company, last time we checked), so this is what I went with. I'm not a big fan of PayPal, but it didn't seem to be a huge problem for all the buyers.

Whenever I have a new release, I can send an email from the DPD panel to all the customers, which automatically generates the appropriate download URL.

As you may expect, DPD gives you all the reporting, charts, data which you may need.

Slack

Over the time, we've created notifications around the whole process. Whenever a new commit is pushed into the repo, a new notification appears on a special Slack channel. Whenever a new sale is made, we have a SalesPanda bot which notifies us about it to the same channel.

Summary

As you see, the whole process is a combination of multiple tools. In some places, they are integrated automatically, while some places are still manually updated. The perfect setup would be to have a Continuous Delivery and we're very close to such thing here. When the delivery is a PDF, the problem is that you would need to email people on every Delivery. This doesn't sound perfect, though. With this book, I think I've had 4 releases so far and this worked well - starting from February 2014 until now.

Feel free to email me at andrzejkrzywda@gmail.com if you need any help with writing a book. It might be overwhelming at first.

The landing page (pure html/css) of the book mentioned in this post is here: http://rails-refactoring.com

I'll refactor this later

Imagine this...

You're finishing your current ticket. The project manager keeps pinging you on IM, whether it's finished. This feature is important to a number of users. The business pressure is high. They want you to finish it ASAP.

"Could you deploy it before the lunch time?" - they beg.

You made some shortcuts in the code. It was just faster to put the code in the controller. You know how service objects are better, but this time it was just faster.

"I'll definitely be refactoring this later" - you think.

Just before the lunch, you push to master, run the deployment script. Everything seems to work. At the lunch, you're thinking how you're going to improve the code - extract the service object, add some more tests to cover the if branch that was added just at the last moment.

Back at the office. Everybody knows that you finished the previous ticket and the PM is happy. From the team perspective - you're now available for the next task.

"Could you help me debugging this problem?" - your colleague asks.

"We need the new reports in the admin panel" - the PM is back to you.

There's no way you can now fix the code shortcuts, you've made in the morning. You switched the context 3 times since then. There's just no time to do it. Other important things are waiting for you.

Did you just increase the technical debt? Is it your fault? You hate this kind of situations. You feel guilty.

Is there a way of avoiding such situations?

Can the code be debt-free?

In that story, you didn't manage to fix the code.
How it could have been done better?

Some people would say that you shouldn't deliver, before the code is great. The task is not finished, before the refactoring is finished.

"It's unprofessional" - they say.

There's some truth to that, but it's based on more assumptions.

"It's OK to have some technical debt, it's a pragmatic approach" - other people say. "Just document the problem somewhere" - they add.

Have you been in projects, where a special place for documenting the technical debt was created?

Some add it to the Pivotal/Redmine/wiki. Others try to keep a file in the repo - something like technical_debt.txt.

It can work, but it requires a huge discipline in the team. I used to be a big fan of this approach. After several approaches to it, now I think it's less realistic.

What are other options?

There's this "pragmatic" option to document the problem in the code comment. From what I see in the projects, I'm reviewing this may be the most popular option. I don't like it. I've looked at dozens of such comments, looked at the git repo history - the comments are almost always out of date. They're there and no one ever fixes the problem.

I really like another option. This practice alone isn't enough, but it's a good middle solution.

Document the hack in the git commit message.

Just write about the situation, why it was created like that, what were the time constraints. You may try to justify it a bit. You may explain how it can be fixed in the future.

Those messages are not part of the code, thus they don't make the code less readable. They are meta information, available to everyone, any time they want.

See a bad code? Just use your IDE to show the git logs for this place.

Bad code has other bad consequences. As developers, we like to point out the places, where code is wrong. Sometimes, a hack is implemented in 5 minutes (pragmatic), but then it takes 2 hours in the future for 2 people to discuss why it even got to the repository.

That's the real meaning of a debt. A 5-minute hack can turn into 2-hour discussion.

I've listed several approaches. I've tried them all. None of them is really good, right?

No hope then?

Well, there's another way of thinking. It's probably less spectacular and it requires better skills, but it can reduce most of the problems above.

First of all, there are hacks and hacks.

Some code should never be written in the first place. If you wrote a >100-lines method from scratch then it's a mess, not a code. Such code shouldn't go the repo. It doesn't matter if it's tested or not. There are some basic rules of coding that apply to our projects. It might be good for just spiking - writing some code to see if the concept can work. Afterwards it gets deleted.

Other cases are more on the technical debt side of things.

It's good to have such skills, that it doesn't make a time difference for you to write the code inside the action or in the service object. I just don't believe the time spent on typing those few characters/words more makes a difference. We're talking about seconds here, not even minutes.

More often, you're in situations, where you need to tweak some existing code to make the feature work. The original code wasn't yours - it doesn't even matter. What matters here is that this place requires a cleanup anyway. Let's say that you didn't have time to improve the existing code. There was no time for the Boy Scout rule. You've extended the existing action by some new 'if' statements. The whole path now works.

Now, this is the problematic situation. It's not your fault that the code was so bad at the beginning. You didn't improve it, though. You even made it worse. How much worse? It depends.

It's good to have a set of rules that all team agrees on.

Rails is so great, because it comes with conventions. As a team, you're not only choosing the web framework but also a convention framework. The problem is that at some point The Rails Way is not enough. This is the scary time when the team may not have enough guidelines. This is the time when it's not so clear anymore, where to put code and how to structure it.

That's why we coined the term The Next Way. It's a label to put some practices into. Service objects, form objects, adapters, repo objects. This is our way to solve the problem of missing conventions. It doesn't solve all of the problems, however it does help in limiting the length of the discussions.

The Next Way is just one possible set of conventions. We go with that but your team may choose anything else. What's important here is to have something that the team can agree on.

Thanks to The Next Way, we know what's the best format of a service object. Yes, there's lots of formats and discussing which one is best takes time.

So, The Next Way describes the goal. Your code is in point A and The Next Way code is Z. There's lots of steps in-between.

Being aware that improving code is a process helps a lot. Some would argue that being in point C is still bad. As long you as you all know that it's better than A - you can all agree that it's an improvement anyway.

Let's take an example here.

Imagine that your new feature requires displaying a new sentence in the view which shows the total value of the orders. The current view and action is very @ivar-heavy. There's no service object here, no repository objects as well. If you know The Next Way, then you know that removing @ivars is one of the steps we make to enable us for further steps.

In this interpretation, adding a new @ivar, like @total_order_value makes the code worse. It's not a big deal, but it's definitely not an improvement.

Now, what's good when you all have the commons set of techniques, like The Next Way is that everyone knows that it needs to be fixed. If you didn't have time to do it (like in the story we started with) in the first place - it doesn't really matter that much.

Why?

Because it's very easy to fix it. Once you know what is the goal, it's a matter of minutes to just turn the @ivar into an explicit rendering of a view following the "Explicitly Render Views with Locals" recipe.

Whoever next comes to this code and is more lucky with the business pressure can just fix it (with the help of the recipe if needed), commit, push, deploy. That's it. No lengthy discussions, no blaming, all clear.

I've seen many teams struggle when they entered the Beyond-The-Rails-Way phase. This phase is hard to avoid. When it happens, the team has problems with the consistency of the code. Sometimes the code looks like a collection of random blog posts. One technique here, another there. There are some good ideas, but there's no clear goal for all the code.

Once we've embraced The Next Way as a common set of techniques it was all easier. It is like The-Rails-Way-On-Steroids. It's more clear, where the code is. It's now clear when the code is in step C or closer to point Z.

What I'd like to encourage you to with this blogpost is to find your set of techniques in your team. This will help you and it will speed up your team work.

You can take what's in our book as a starting point and fork from there. The "Patterns" part of the book is all about The Next Way and its techniques. This is the description of the goal - the Z points. The "Recipes" chapter, on the other hand is all about the steps between the points.

Buy the book here

If you already bought the book, please consider starting the discussion in your team. Ask if it's clear what are the team conventions once The Rails Way is not enough.

Once you have the book, please don't just read it and put it away. The recipes need to be practiced regularly before they become a habit.

Start today - timebox 15 minutes, choose any action and try to apply the Recipe. I encourage you to start with the "Explicitly Render Views with Locals" one. It's a good start to get the feel of such changes.

There's a second episode of the Rails Refactoring Podcast - we're talking about the DNA of the Rails community and about The Rails Way. The whole episode is 35 minutes. We now also support RSS and iTunes, so subscribe to the podcast if you haven't done so yet :)

The Rails culture and The Rails Way

What is Rails for you?

Is it just a technology? Is it about the community?

Do you remember the first time you scaffolded a Rails application?

How did it feel?

Were you proud of achieving so much in so little time? Did you impress anyone by using Rails?

Rails is no longer the youngest technology around. Did it change anything?

Did you ever think how Rails ideas helped to shape the world? Did you notice how many startups choose Rails as the technology? It’s amazing that sometimes those people don’t fully know their business idea yet, but they know it will be implemented in Rails!

Rails changed the business world. For the better.

It was no longer so expensive to come up with a prototype or with an MVP. More ideas could be validated.

Some of the ideas were totally wrong. They didn’t have the market fit. Still, their authors lost less money than they would by choosing other (at that time) technology.

Many ideas (and their authors!) were validated positively. The MVP has proved to be interesting for the users. People wanted to pay for using it. Those ideas turned into businesses. Many of those still exist today.

As developers, we sometimes forget how much impact our work has on the world around us. All of the above wouldn’t have happened without us and Rails.

What about those less technical people? Did they have their chance in the Rails revolution?

Yes!

It was late 2007 when I was contacted by a potential client. He said he was a fashion designer and he needed help with Rails deployment.

What?

A fashion designer needing help with Rails deployment!

“What do you want to deploy?”, I asked, assuming he got some technical terminology wrong. “Oh, it’s a prototype of a web application which helps men choose good clothes for them.”

I looked at it and I was speechless. It was a fully working app, with a non-trivial algorithm implemented in Ruby.

It was actually ready for deployment. That’s all I was needed for here. This scared me. One year before, I decided to rely my programming career on Rails. Is this what I signed up for? Non-technical people being able to implement an application needing me just for the deployment?

I wanted to go back to my former Java world. To the world, where my job wasn’t threatened by fashion designers!

I realised that something big is happening.

I was lucky enough to be part of it. Rails enabled more people to be involved in creating web applications. I was very curious where it's all going to.

That was the time when new gems (they were called plugins at that time) started to pop up every week - acts_as_taggable, acts_as_anything, acts_as_hasselhoff (yes, there's such plugin: https://github.com/lazyatom/acts_as_hasselhoff/ ).

The fashion projects ended very well. When the client understood that I'm faster than him in developing the features, he took care of marketing and other stuff. I wasn't just the deployment person anymore.

Creating new Rails projects in 2008 was like combining little pieces together.

At the beginning it was fun. However, the whole new wave of Rails developers started creating new versions of their gems every week. Each version had different dependencies. The authentication libraries kept changing every month at that time. At some point, it wasn't just connecting the pieces, but also hard work on untangling the dependencies to make it all work together.

The Rails Way was born

This concept was never clearly defined. It was a term to describe the Rails approach.

It's worth noting that at that time, everyone in Rails was coming from somewhere. I was from the Java world. Some people came from the PHP world. There were even some ex-Microsoft people.

At that time there were no developers who "were born with Rails".

When The Rails Way concept was appearing it was a way of distinguishing it from "the architecture astronauts Java way" or the "PHP spaghetti way". We needed to be unique and have something to unite us.

Most of our community DNA was very good, but there was also something negative. A big part of the Rails community was united with the anti-Java slogans. Everything Java-like was rejected. XML? No, thank you, we've got yaml. Patterns? No, thanks.

As a community, we entirely skipped the DDD movement, which took over the Java and .NET worlds.

"We don't need this"

"We've got ActiveRecord. We take the object from the database row and use it in all the three layers. Fat models or fat controllers? Whatever, let's just not create new layers."

This way of thinking became more popular.

The Rails Way was very successful

A new generation of developers started to appear. They were the ones who were born with Rails. Ruby was their first language. Rails was their first framework. The didn't bring the baggage of Java or PHP past life.

They joined the Rails community and embraced what was presented to them. That was The Rails Way.

What is The Rails Way?

It's hard to define it easily. I tried to do it recently and I found a few features that make it so uniq:

• ActiveRecord objects everywhere, including the views
• External gems used for most of the features
• Non-trivial logic implemented with the combination of filters, callbacks, validations, state-machine - often in a non-easy-to-follow-way.
• Magic - Convention over Configuration, DRY, metaprogramming
• Only 3 layers - Models, Views, Controllers

When is The Rails Way good?

It's really good for developers who start their career. I keep teaching The Rails Way to the students - at the beginning. That's the most efficient way to get a result. It's the best way to stay motivated while learning more.

Within a project, The Rails Way is great at the beginning, when you're still not sure, where you go with the features and you need to experiment. In different project, the meaning of the beginning may be different. In some projects, I see the need to get out of the Rails Way as soon as the second month of development starts. In other projects it may be a year.

When is The Rails Way not enough?

When you start wondering - does that code belong to the model or to the controller - it's a sign that you may be looking for something more than the Rails Way.

When it's not clear how a feature works, because it's MAGIC - it's a sign the code controls you, not the other way round. You need something more to turn the magic into an explicit code.

When you start creating model classes which don't inherit from ActiveRecord::Base and you have problems explaining to the team, why you needed that.

When you try to test, but it either takes ages, because you need full integration tests, or you die by over-mocking.

When you try to switch to a hosted CI, but they are unable to run your test suite.

When you can only migrate data at nights, because the migrations lock the tables.

Learning from mistakes

I've had the "luck" to review hundreds of Rails projects over the last 10 years. The same patterns were visible over and over again. An app was in quick development for the first months and then it started stagnating to the point where no one was happy with the speed.

I've started collecting those patterns. I grouped them into code smells, anti-patterns, magic tricks.

Alternative architectures

Meanwhile, over the years, I was studying many non-Rails-Way architectures like DCI, DDD, CQRS, Hexagonal.

Then I started to draw lines between those two.

• How can I get from the Rails code smells into DDD?
• Does DCI make sense in Rails apps?
• Is there place for the Hexagonal adapters?
• What are the aggregates in a Rails app?

Ruby and Rails are very unique and specific. Some things fit well into it, while others seem foreign to the way we write code.

The Next Way techniques

• service objects
• adapters
• repository objects
• form objects
• domain objects
• events
• presenters

From A to Z

I picked some of the building blocks of the architectures and tried to apply them in the Rails projects. The ones that didn't fit, I rejected. At the end, I only kept the ones which looked helpful for the typical problems.

This was just the beginning. Even if you know the starting problem (point A) and you know the end result (point Z), there's many steps in between that need to be made very carefully.

Safety of changes

I assumed the code transformations will be done on production applications. No place for any risk here. Some of the changes may even be applied to untested code.

Your application needs to be safe, even when you apply the changes. Your boss and your clients will never allow introducing any bug "because I was improving the architecture". It's just not acceptable.

Working on the recipes

It took me over a year to put together the refactoring recipes. Your code contains lots of small issues which make it harder to introduce a better design.

You won't introduce service objects if your controllers are filters-heavy. The dependencies will break your code.

You won't introduce service objects, if your views rely on @ivars magic. You need to be explicit with what you're passing to the views.

You won't make the build faster if it the tests still hit the database. You won't get rid of the real database as long as your ActiveRecord classes contain any logic. You need to introduce repository objects.

You won't introduce service objects easily, if your controller action can do different things, depending on the params (params[:action] anyone?). You need to use the routing constraints.

You won't find any shortcut, unless you know the SimpleDelegator trick which helps you move a lot of code into a temporary service object at once.

Those are some of the things I was working on. Those recipes are tested in big Rails projects by many different teams.

Those recipes work.
They will make your architecture improvement easier.

The book

This all led to me to writing the "Fearless Refactoring: Rails Controllers" book.

The core of the book are recipes. However, the recipes alone may leave you with just the mechanics, so we've added many chapters which explain the techniques in details.

We've also added the "Big examples" chapters. They take you through some (ugly) code and apply the recipes, one by one.

Thanks to all of you who bought the book when it was still beta since February I'm very confident about its quality. You sent me a great feedback. You sent me the before/after pieces of code. This book wouldn't happen without the people who trusted us so early. Thank you!

1.0 release

Some of you prefer to read books only when they are completed. Now is the best time to get it.

On Monday, December 1st, the book goes 1.0, yay! During the next days we still keep the discounted price: $35. On Monday, the price goes up to its final price ($49). On Monday, you'll receive the 1.0 book update, no matter when you bought it.

You can get the book at http://rails-refactoring.com. Use the REFACTORING code and you will get it 20% off!

(we also have the 1-day 25% discount for our "Developers Oriented Project Management" book with the BLACKFRIDAY2014 code - get it here: http://blog.arkency.com/developers-oriented-project-management/ - many people switched to remote work after reading this book!)

Terry Pratchett, the Long Earth and IT projects

I’ve just finished reading the “The Long Earth” novel by Terry Pratchett and Steven Baxter. While I expected the book to be more Pratchett’ish in the sense of humour (it’s not) I found it a very inspiring read anyway.

Parallel worlds

“Long Earth” is based on the idea of parallel worlds. While reading it, I couldn’t resist the temptation of imagining what would happen if we had the same idea applied to IT projects.

Remember the last time you started a project? I’m sure you’ve had some ideas on which architecture to choose or more likely, which language/framework to base it on.

Should we go with Rails? Isn’t node.js the better thing nowadays? Is it a good idea to go with CQRS here? Scala will save us? This time it will be better?

Now, imagine that all the decisions were made and all the alternative realities are happening.

Let’s say, that in the Primary World you went with Rails, Angular, without CQRS.

3 months in, you have the typical Rails problems, the models are overloaded with responsibilities, the controllers are not really that thin. The build now takes 5 minutes while most of the frontend code is untested. The team members start complaining - “We wouldn’t have such problems with Node.js”, “Can you see it now - we should have gone with CQRS in the first place”, “Scala, we need Scala, because of reasons (monads)”.

Given the idea of parallel worlds (or rather parallel IT projects), you could jump into the world where Scala was chosen, just to notice, that the project is even in a worse shape, because some people didn’t get the idea of non-mutating state and it’s all not pure enough, while the frontend is not done at all, because all the time was spent discussing why Scala is actually worse than Haskell.

Then you jump into the node.js alternative world. A quick look at the codebase - yes, callbacks everywhere. How did it go with code reuse on server/frontend? Oh yes, they don’t really share that much. Also, part of the codebase is in JS, while the other parts are in CoffeeScript, because you hired those new JavaScript developers, who hate Coffee, while the Rubyists in the team can’t parse JS at all.

Wouldn’t that be great?

It’s all science-fiction obviously. I wonder, though, how much would it change our decision making process, if we knew that we could always look at how it goes in the alternative worlds.

Would it make our decisions better?

Would we learn that all projects have problems at some point, despite the technologies and architecture choices?

Would we learn that no matter what we do, we may end up with another legacy codebase?

Now, back to reality. We have only one, the Primary World. We can’t jump into other worlds. What tools do we have to measure our decisions? Is it actually worth to measure at such a high level?

Maybe it’s better to just learn how to get out of any mess that we (and others) create?

The secret to change your team habits

Over the last few weeks, we've been sending several lessons to our Arkency Newsletter  (not there yet?) on how to become more Async with your programming team. They included techniques like:

Async, textual, standups
Async knowledge sharing and gathering documentation before synchronous online meetings
Using and building tools which can greatly support you with your async and/or remote environment
Splitting bigger stories into smaller ones on the fly
And more...


By applying those lessons, you can make your team more effective. It doesn't matter if you do Rails, Python or Java. The team techniques and problems remain the same.

I'm sure, you've noticed that it's not as easy to switch the team habits to the new ones.


Why do the people forget to work on small stories only?
Why it's so hard to introduce async standups instead of the sync, voice-based ones, that everyone loves?
Why are people not reviewing each other code changes?

The thing is, it's hard to eliminate habits (ask any smoker!).

There are two rules for introducing new habits:

1. Know what's your goal, what are the new habits to introduce. Luckily, you know the techniques we suggested in our email course and in our book.
2. It's easier to change existing habits than to eliminate them

The second point is crucial (and that's the secret!):

Habits are based on hooks (think Aspect Oriented Programming, but in real life).

What are the current habits in your team? Is it that everyone prepares at 9.50am, because at 10am the standup starts? Don't try to eliminate it (yet), just turn it into something different. Do the text-based standup instead, even if it's at the same time with everybody. Just share your statuses in the communication tools or in the Google Doc or Hackpad. That's a smaller step and probably more likely to be adopted. Heck, you can even do it, while all are on Skype, if you prefer even smaller steps.

There's a cool concept of Tiny Habits, that can help your team change more easily. This concept is directed towards single people and their habits, but the mechanisms stay the same for the team - try it and apply it for your team (it's free!):http://tinyhabits.com/

A good experiment is to identify your team "hooks". Some example ones may include:

• a new commit pushed to the repo
• new build failure
• standup time
• weekly meeting time
• start of the day of work
• end of the day of work
• lunch time
• new deployment

Once you identify your hooks, try to replace the actions that happen before/after the hook happens. Make it as simple as possible!

Let's say, that one of your goals is to increase the knowledge transfer in your team and you decided that the 'foreman' technique is the way to go. The simplest form of 'foreman' is to review someone's else code. You can gradually introduce it as a technique in your team, that whenever anyone finishes a ticker ("after finish ticket" - hook), they look at some of the recent commits (action!) in the repo and comment on them (even if it's a simple "+1"). At the beginning, you can make it just 10 minutes. It's enough to at least look at some code.

Hook: You finished a ticket
Action: Review someone's else code for 10 minutes

You can't do much in 10 minutes, but if you know the Kronos/Chairos time management technique, that we were promoting, you know how to use the time best.

Good luck!

If you feel, like there's still more you can learn about the new async team techniques, just grab our recent book - it's designed to safely refactor your team towards being more effective!

Custom exceptions or domain events?

The topic of custom exceptions is surprisingly controversial. Some argue that exceptions shouldn't be used for anything related to "business", while others (me included) say that exceptions like InsufficientFunds are fine - I even wrote a whole chapter about using custom exceptions to simplify controllers in my Rails Refactoring book.

I've read an interesting blog post today about custom exceptions (here - unfortunately it's in Polish), where the author advocates for using "business exceptions".

The example comes from a dialling application, so there are the following exceptions:

• CallAlreadyInProgressException, 
• IncorrectNumberException, 
• NumberAlreadyDialedException

When I first looked at the code, I nodded in agreement. Given such domain, those exceptions make total sense to me. I'd implement it the same way.

When I linked to this post in our team chat, Mirek (who has more knowledge about DDD and CQRS than I do) said that it'd be better to implement with domain events. This surprised me a bit, as when the topic of custom exceptions is brought up, domain events are rarely shown as an alternative.

What's the difference between custom exceptions and domain events?

Look at this code:

Domain events decouple the call to the method from returning the result. This is at the core of the CQRS approach - one of the most inspiring architectures I've ever read about. In short - any system operation is either a Command (a change to the system) or a Query (a read from the system). This rule drives the whole architecture.

In the code, it means that when you call dialler.call(number), you're not directly interested in the result, even to the point, that the method can fail (raise an exception). You made a command and that's it.

Now, obviously, you do need to know about the failure. That's why you publish an event, using whatever mechanism under the hood. It can be a simple singleton EventBus class, which just keeps a map of objects interested in certain events and notifies them if any such event happens. In our case, we could have a UINotifier class listening to the CallAlreadyInProgress event and sending a special UI message to the user of the system (the technical details are not important here - it can be via polling or Web Sockets).

There is another difference - with events we need to "publish" the fact that all went fine. What was implicit with exceptions (no exception is raised - success), here needs to be explicit. We publish the "ConnectionEstablished" event.

This creates a nice simplification of the whole code around it. It may make it a bit more indirect, but it's actually very simple. All of the pieces of code involved do just one thing.

Remote team - mobile tools

When working remotely and/or asynchronously you may be often in situations where a mobile access to the team/project data is very useful. See my previous blog post on desktop tools for remote teams.

Here is a list of tools I often use in the context of the Arkency team. I use all of them from my iPhone 5s. I think most of them have their Android versions.

• Team/project
• Slack
• our IM tool of choice, good UX, easy to use, even with a 20+ team
• the nice thing is that it caches all the history of our channels, so I can sync with them whenever I want
• Hackpad
• accessing offline and creating hackpads offline is the killer feature
• Trello
• iOctocat
• This app pushes me a notification whenever any new commit appears in any of my github repos. I can easily review the diff, comment on the changes or just browse through the code - highly recommended!
• basic version is free. it's worth upgrading to receive notifications ($12.99)
• Mumble
• the voice communication tool of our choice, push to talk, multiple rooms
• Social
• Twitter
• Facebook
• AlienBlue
• a Reddit client - useful if you often post your blog posts to Reddits
• free, but worth upgrading for $1.99
• Getting Things Done
• MindNode
• $9.99
• it's the mind mapping tool, that I was looking for a long time
• it has a Mac version (paid separately) and integrates/syncs via iCloud
• Evernote
• Quick to find important information, even from a mobile.
• Geo
• Foursquare
• Even though, we are a remote team, many of us live in the Wroclaw area. When people are in the habit of checking in, you can easily see if anyone is close to you right now. I'm a strong believer of async/remote work but when there's a chance to meet face to face, that's always a good idea!

This blogpost is a work-in-progress chapter from the "Developer Oriented Project Management" book. The book is just weeks before the final release. Grab it now, before the price goes up!

Async standups

When you work remotely, you want to have some kind of a standup meeting regularly. In our team, after experimenting with many different approaches, we settled with text-based, asynchronous standups every day. Additionally, every project has a weekly 'sync' meeting.

Whatever tool we currently use for remote communication (irc in the past, now Slack), we create a channel that is dedicated to #standup. We don't have a specific time to post there, usually we do it, when we begin our work session - so, in the spirit of async - different people at different times.

I consider #standup to be a very good opportunity to communicate cross-project, to educate, to learn, to help. Short standup messages are not bad, but they miss this opportunity.

When writing the standup message, think more about the others, than about yourself - what can they get from it by reading your status?

Example 

Yesterday I finished the "fix the price calculator" feature, which was mostly about removing the Coffee code and rely on the value retrieved from the backend, via ajax. The nice thing was that the backend code was already covered with tests, while the Coffee one wasn't. After that I helped Jack with the "allow logging in with email" feature (we need it now because we have a batch import of users from system X soon). After that I did a small ticket, where I block buying licences for special periods of time. This was nicely TDD'ed, thanks to the concept of aggregate, introduced by Robert recently - all the tests pass < 1s. Here is a commit worth looking at: .
Today I'm going to start with foreman'ing the recent commits and after that I want to work the XYZ system to allow a better editing of entries. I'm not sure how to start it, so all help is welcome.

What's good?

• many details, 
• letting other people jump in and help me,
• some opinions about the code that I saw, 
• some details about practices I applied (TDD, foreman'ing) 
• reminds about some business information - import of users from the X system, happening soon 
• links to the commit (potential education) 

Format 

1. yesterday
2. today
3. good thing
4. bad things
5. challenges
6. call for help
7. reminder about good practices (tdd, foreman, help colleagues) 
8. code examples (link)
9. business-related info


(this blog post is a work-in-progress chapter in the Developer-oriented Project Management book.)

Remote team tools

I've been speaking today at a local IT entrepreneur meetup about remote work and about the ways a company can transition towards being more remote.

The part of the talk that seemed to be most interesting was the toolset that we're using at the moment. I thought I'd share this list here, as well.

Remember, that tools should just support your process and not replace it. If your goals are clear to you and your team, then the tools are just implementation details.

• Internal (written) Communication - IRC
• Requirements/Tickets - Trello
• Documentation - Hackpad
• Voice communication - Mumble
• Code reviews - Github
• Continuous Integration - Jenkins
• Remote pairing - tmux
• Video calls - Google Hangouts

Internal (written) Communication - IRC

For most of the internal communication in the team, we've been using IRC. It's a kind of a old-school tool. It served us well for about 7 years now, but meanwhile we've been experimenting with alternatives, like Slack (just recently).

The tool itself is not that important, it's the goal it serves that is interesting.

We have one channel per project and several generic channels, like #lol, #arkency, #links, #coffee, #products, #blog.

The project channels are often integrated with other tools and receive notifications from Trello, Github, Jenkins. This is like the headquarters.

In some projects we also use Slack or Flowdock for the same goal.

Requirements/Tickets - Trello

This is our default project management tool. It works as a backlog. It contains many tickets/stories, prioritised and described. It helps detailing the requirements and seeing what's the status.

The tickets are also refactored - we extract new tickets, rename them, group them - whatever is needed.

In some projects we use Pivotal, Redmine or Asana for the same goal.

Documentation  - Hackpad

Hackpad - this is my favourite one. If you're not familiar with it already, it works similarly to Google Docs. In my opinion, it's a bit more interactive.

It's basically a wiki on steroids. It has support for collections, it notifies about changes via email. You clearly see who wrote what. You can comment sections of code and checkboxes.

Whatever interesting happens in our company, it gets an URL on Hackpad. Do I have an idea for a bigger refactoring in one project? I create a hackpad, paste some code and describe the plan. Others can join whenever they want (async!) and add their comments.

Voice communication - Mumble

Mumble is probably unknown to you. It's a tool very popular among gamers. They use it to communicate in a team, during a game. We started using it, as it was much more reliable than Skype. It's a very minimalistic tool. It has the concept of channels, so we designed it similarly to our communication tool (IRC). It also allows recording the conversations, so that people who were not able to attend (async!) can later listen to the most important fragments.

Code reviews - Github

We use Github for hosting code and for making the micro-code reviews. I call it micro, as they only let us comment the deltas - commits or pull request. They don't let us comment the existing code base, which is a limitation many similar tools share.
If there's one place, I'd like to see improvement for remote teams it would be a proper code review tool.

Continuous Integration - Jenkins

We host the Jenkins instances to build our projects. I'm very far from liking it - it has many quirks, but overall we didn't find a good alternative to switch, yet.

Remote pairing - tmux

I blogged about remote pair programming 6 years ago. At that time, I was using screen + vim and I still think it's a good combo (together with Skype or Mumble). Nowadays, we don't pair program too often, but when people in my team do that, they often use tmux to connect to each other (terminal-based). Another tool is tmate.io, which is also tmux-based.

On a good connection you can also use Google Hangouts and their Desktop Sharing feature.

Video calls - Google Hangouts

We use video calls very rarely and mostly, when external teams are involved who prefer it. In that case, we use Google Hangouts.

Summary

It's important to understand that those are only tools. They can change. I'm pretty sure, next year, we'll use a different toolset. What's important is the process around it - how you collaborate on projects, how you split stories, how you discuss, how you collaborate on the code.


If you'd like to learn more about the techniques that we use in our remote and async collaboration (not only about the tools), then let me recommend the Robert Pankowecki book about it (I also wrote one chapter): Developer Oriented Project Management.

What tools are you using? What would you recommend?

TDD and Rails - what makes a good Unit?

There is an ongoing discussion about TDD and Rails. It was recently heated by some some of the DHH statements in his RailsConf keynote and in the blog post: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/2014/tdd-is-dead-long-live-testing.html

One aspect of this discussion is the confusion about - What makes a good Unit?

In the Rails community, I've seen people overusing mocks and stubs - you can detect it by looking at all the "should_receive" calls in the codebase. They're not always bad, but they might be potential code smells.

The reason we use should_receive is in a way to draw the boundary between what's important to test right now and what's outside of the test scope.

Unit example

Let's take an example - you've got an Order, which can have many OrderLines, a ShippingAddress and a Customer.

Do we have 4 units here, representing each class? It depends, but most likely it may be easier to treat the whole thing as a Unit. You can write a test which test the whole thing through the Order object. The test is never aware of the existence of the ShippingAddress. It's an internal implementation detail of the Order unit.

A class doesn't usually make a good Unit, it's usually a collection of classes that is interesting.

This way of defining a Unit gives you tests, that don't need to change whenever the internals change - that's a good thing. You don't want to change tests on every refactoring - in fact it's a smell.

Unit-based architectures

Some time ago, I wrote a surprisingly popular post: The four architectures that will inspire your programming in which I listed:

• Hexagonal Architecture
• Clean Architecture
• DDD
• DCI

In a way, all of them are focused on defining what a good Unit is and how to separate it from other Units. 

DDD has the concept of an aggregate, quote: "A DDD aggregate is a cluster of domain objects that can be treated as a single unit."

Clean Architecture has the concept of use-cases which touch the topic slightly differently (by operations, not units), but overall it's very similar: http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2012/08/13/the-clean-architecture.html

Hexagonal Architecture is all about a Unit surrounded by adapters, in my interpretation. They often call it the Middle Hex. http://alistair.cockburn.us/Hexagonal+architecture

Last, but not least - DCI. This architecture deserves a special mention here. DHH quoted James Coplien in his TDD talk. James has been famous not only from his strong opinions on TDD, but more from his activity in the DCI world. He's one of the fathers of this movement. DCI is the most inspiring architecture here. Ruby and DCI makes a fantastic combination, however not all can work as in the DCI theory. DCI gives good tools for defining what a Unit can be. In short, their approach to what a Context is, may be used to defining Units. A Unit is this paradigm is a collaboration of objects. Read more here: http://fulloo.info/

Have fun in researching more!

If you want to follow more of my work - I'm writing a book on Refactoring Rails apps, which is already available. At the moment, I'm writing new chapters on how to write tests that support refactoring of Rails apps.

Be careful with "the Rails way"

The "the Rails way" expression is becoming popular in the Rails community. Depending on the people who use it, it means either something good or something bad. 

(btw, this blog post has nothing to do with a book with a similar title)

This post is about why I think that "the Rails way" is not always so positive. 

Let me start with the DHH ping pong story, which is happening now as it has a good code example to focus on.

The history

The code ping pong with DHH has already started and my submission was chosen by DHH as the first one.
For those of you who are not familiar with the code ping pong action - there was an interesting discussion on HackerNews triggered by the “Rails - the Missing Parts” post.

At some point DHH wrote:

"If this is a poor example, pick a good example. I'll be happy to code ping pong you whatever example you choose.”

The idea was picked up by Marcin "the awesome" Stecki from Netguru, who created http://www.dhh-ping-pong.com/ and announced it at the http://wrocloverb.com/ conference.

As I’m writing a book on this exact topic (how to turn Rails controllers into service objects) I decided to submit my example. I took the code from my recent blog post on refactoring: http://blog.arkency.com/2014/02/rails-refactoring-the-aha-moments/

DHH picked up the example and here we are, having different solutions to the same Rails problem.

This is the actuall Pong page: http://www.dhh-ping-pong.com/pongs/13 (you can vote there).

Why I’m participating in this?

It wasn't an easy decision. Going public with some piece of code is not unusual in the age of open source. Here, however, it's going to be compared. It's going to be pointed out. There's some voting going on. I'm an easy target now ;) 

It's not about voting, though.

The Rails community is huge nowadays. It's not the same small group of people, as it was in 2004-2005. We have hundreds of thousands Rails programmers in the world. Every day, new people are joining our community.

Rails is no longer used only for small apps. 

It's used in enterprise. People rely on Rails codebases to make money for living. I'm sure, that somewhere out there, there is a Rails codebase, on which people lives depend on.

Let's talk about responsibility.

Are we responsible for all Rails codebases out there? For sure, not. But there's a lot we can do to help our community and thus help the people who rely on Rails codebases.

Can we do something about those codebases being better? Not directly. 

A small thing, that we can do is to trigger discussions. It's not for the sake of discussions. It's for the sake of learning. For the sake of improving. 

It's easy to go too abstract with discussions. This is where DHH is totally right. 

Let's focus on the code. 

I'm glad that DHH picked my example. It's based on a real Redmine code. Such code is written everyday by many programmers. The problem is small enough to be presented in one page. It's big enough to show different approaches.

Can my code be better? For sure! My code wasn't meant to be perfect. The main focus of the research and practice for my book is how to let people get out of the messy Rails codebases on a step-by-step basis. You can't risk rewriting the whole part. Every line of code can be hiding some potential user path. You have to make safe steps. 

I believe in gradual improvement. I prefer evolution over revolution in the code.

That's why my example is not perfect. It's just a snapshot from a refactoring session that I took one evening. However, it's good enough to show some concepts. 

It's showing the concept of a Service object. Even, if at the current shape it's using the "hack" of SimpleDelegator, it's worth to have it extracted.

I'm not proud of this code, neither I'm ashamed.

It's hard to discuss code refactorings without taking the time cost into account. It's not impossible to rewrite Redmine to a better code. It's a function of time. 

If you look at the DHH code, the shape of the code (yes, code has a shape!) is better. Overall, the example is shorter than mine. I think not all the cases are covered, but that's not the point. DHH focused on using some of the Rails features to make the code shorter. The code is good. I'd take it over the existing Redmine code, without any doubt (assuming all the paths were covered!).

It's nice to see both the pieces of code, side by side.

We both agree that the existing code was bad

First of all - that's probably most important here - we both agree that the existing code was bad. That's a good starting point.

Where do we differ?

I didn't actually talk to DHH about it. I hope I'm not misinterpreting his intents here.

The main difference seems to be the fact, that I tried to escape the framework as early as possible. I avoided controller filters. I avoided model callbacks. Those are the things that I teach how to get rid of, if possible. DHH went the opposite way, he's using filters, he's using callbacks.

I'm not here to judge which approach is better.

Let me explain my refactorings here. I want to isolate my code from the framework. I didn't go that far, but I also want to isolate the 'logic' from persistence in the next steps (by using the repository pattern). The goal here is to have your logic framework-independent. To be able to run tests quickly, without hitting the database. To be able to split your app into smaller pieces - gems or microservices. To be able to control the whole application easier, this way.

In a way, it's an unusual approach in the Rails world. It's not so unusual if you look at other communities - Java, .Net, Scala, Clojure, Haskell, even PHP (with the fantastic Symfony2 framework).

Wasn't that the reason that we use Rails not to need to escape from it?

Yes and no.

It's a longer story, for another blog post, probably. In short, I believe that Rails is good for the start (as long, as you're not efficient with other approaches yet), however it's bad for a longer run. 

Rails gives you a nice start, very quickly. This usually helps with the costs and the business side of the project. In the longer run, though - you have a much bigger codebase ( think > 100 database tables, if that means anything useful) and you want to split into smaller pieces. The more you're using Rails-specific features, the harder it is to split. It's a hard, ongoing transformation that can take months or years. That's why it's so important to realise it quickly and start sooner.

I've seen many projects that are stagnating with a typical Rails codebase. It's so hard to escape from the Rails monolith at some point.

You can say, that it's about programmers having low skills and that's the problem, not Rails. It's right to some extent. However, when you're stuck with a Rails codebase, you rely on a lot of magic. The Rails framework code is in fact becoming your code. Whatever happens inside, it's your problem now. It's hard to be a good programmer in the legacy Rails environment.

At the beginning the pain is not so visible. It's hard later, when new requirements are coming. The ones, that are not shown on all Rails tutorials. The ones that require you to actually do some domain modelling, to secure the business logic, to hide some data from different roles. This is the place, where Rails is not helping you - it's going into your way. This is the moment, when you realise that mixing logic and persistence is not really the best idea. This is the moment, when your build already takes 20 minutes and you'd actually prefer to add even more tests. This is the moment, when you're better with a modular design instead of the connected design, as Kent Beck rightly points out.

I'm showing a way that makes it possible to deal with bigger Rails codebases in the longer run. I'm not saying this is the only way to stay alive. It's just one way.

DHH and his team are very successful with "the Rails way". Business-wise I can't even compare my "successes" with their huge success. 

Why choose the way I'm suggesting over "the Rails way"? I believe it's easier. It's based more on the overall programming rules, than on relying on some specific Rails features. You can look at the projects created in other communities and apply the lessons in your project. When you rely on Rails, you're in the ActiveRecord-based programming land. A place that lives somewhere between a relational database and OOP. It's a world on its own. You can be successful here, but it's a one-way ticket.

Refactoring - the human factor

I talked to many people about the concept of refactoring recently. I've noticed a pattern. Not all team members are equally pro-refactoring.

I know how annoying it may be, when you're doing your best to improve the code, you learn how to do it the best way, you try to introduce it and then it's not only not appreciated, but also often rejected. Why is that?

There's plenty of reasons, but most of them come down to the fact that a project is a team work. In a team, we work with other people. We all share the same goal - to let the project succeed. However, we're humans - each of us has a different perception of the goal and the path that leads to this goal.

You may think that it's obvious that a better code will result in the success of the project. In most cases that's true.

You may notice different levels of the refactoring-scepticism.

Do we really need to change the existing code?

If you see such attitude, then one way of dealing with it is going back to the reasons for the refactoring. Is it because you spend a tremendous time on bug fixing? Is it because adding new features takes more and more time? Maybe it's because the app is slow and refactoring can help you extract some parts and later optimize them?

There's never refactoring for the sake of refactoring.

Whatever is the reason, make sure everyone understands it. If there's no understanding, move the discussion one step back. Why is it that your perception of the situation is different? Programmers are smart and logical people. Once you all see facts, metrics and numbers, it's easier to agree on the same solution.

Refactoring takes a lot of time

This is a fair argument. We all care about the time we all spend on the project. Even if it's you doing the refactoring, then everyone is aware of the fact, that this time has a cost.

The best way to deal with this argument is to keep improving refactoring skills. Both yours and your teammates. Examples from the Fowlers' "Refactoring" book are great. If you've done a quick refactoring, maybe it's worth showing to your team on a projector or record a screencast?

What you want is to have the refactoring cost being almost negligible. If your refactoring changes are fast and safe, then it's quicker to make the change than to discuss it.

I wouldn't refactor this part

I made the mistake of refactoring the part of the code that wasn't really that important to change. It depends of the time spent. It's always good to improve the code everywhere, but what is the price? Does it take you 10 minutes, 1 hour? 10 hours? 10 days? Is it worth it?

Time is our currency, make sure we spend them in the best way.

I would refactor it differently

This problem appears when we have different visions of the refactoring. Let's say you learnt everything you could about DCI and you're sure that's the best direction to go with your project. You envision the contexts, the roles, the objects. Slowly, you keep extracting more code into modules that are later (hopefully) used as roles.

At the same time, your colleague kept studying the concept of microservices. His goal is to split the app into multiple services talking to each other via HTTP/JSON.

Where you see contexts, he sees services.

This represents an architectural difference between both of you.

To be honest, this is a nice problem to have. It means, that people in your team are passionate. They put time into learning new concepts and they are constantly trying to image the app in a different way.

How to deal with it?

I've chosen DCI and microservices as examples, but you could have a much different pair. What matters here is that most of the good architectures are not in fact that much different, however surprising it may sound.

If you want to go DCI and your colleague wants to go microservices, then you have more in common than conflicts. Putting behaviour in the modules, as a step into using them as DCI roles is also a step into the microservices direction (you split the logic in a way that can be used by the microservice, later on). Your main difference is probably the last step - really, that's a nice problem to have :)


One last thing, sometimes you may resort to another option:

Don't call it refactoring

OK, this one is controversial. In some teams, refactoring have negative meaning. It's probably for good reasons. Maybe they've had someone in the team, who didn't deliver value apart from endless refactoring? Try to understand it.

The goal is not to 'do refactoring', the goal is to do better, as a team.

If it doesn't help you, don't call it refactoring. Some teams are totally fine with the idea of The Boy Scout Rule, which means more or less the same as refactoring. Keep improving the code quality, don't call it a refactoring.


Summary

No matter what is the reason of the initial misunderstanding about the refactoring, make sure everyone understands it the same. Most of the times, there's something rational behind the refactoring need.

----

What you just read is an excerpt from my book: "Rails Refactoring: Service Objects". If you're a Rails programmer and struggle with an existing not-so-pretty Rails code, then you may find it interesting. The book is 191 pages, full of code examples and with recipes how to safely, step-by-step improve your Rails controllers, even if you don't have a full test coverage. 

If you have examples of ugly Rails controllers, then please, send them to me: andrzejkrzywda@gmail.com.

Twitter as a geek party

Why do I follow close to 2000 people?
Why do I keep complaining about the Twitter following limit (2000)?
Why am I active on Twitter?
Why did I just unfollow 150 people?

[UPDATE February, 2017]
This blogpost was written when Twitter was a great place for developers who were mostly interested in dev content. This was great for many years. As of late 2016, this has changed a lot. Even if you follow developers, you'll see mostly current politics content, usually US-centric. This means the technique described in this blogpost doesn't make sense anymore. Twitter is no longer an inspiring place for developers, who prefer to read about politics elsewhere or who prefer to stay out of politics.
----


Twitter is an ongoing, very inspiring geek party

I use Twitter in a bit of unusual way. Twitter to me is an ongoing, very inspiring geek party. It’s like a huge, virtual room (Snow Crash anyone?) , which I can enter, whenever I want. I do it every now and then for short moments. I click some links, I see the pics. Conversations are most interesting - I focus on those. What do people talk about? Is it interesting to me? Is it interesting to my work?

Because the topics of their discussions inspire me

I’m mostly connected to the Ruby/Rails community. Why do I follow PHP, Java, .NET people? Because the topics of their discussions inspire me. Why do they keep talking about DDD, when it’s a completely unknown concept in the Ruby community? Is it worth researching it? Can I join the conversation and explain how this problem is solved with Ruby?

I read about 10-20% of the tweets

2000 people is much, but not much if you want to get inspired from many different directions. I hate the Twitter limit - for anti-bot reasons, they put this limit of 2000, probably with the assumption that no one sane, would want to follow so many people. There’s a problem with this assumption. I do want to follow thousands of people, but I don’t want to read all of the tweets. That would be insane. Twitter is not my email - I don’t read everything. I estimate that I read about 10-20% of the tweets. I want to have this mix of people in my timeline. Ruby is a lovely community, but the discussions don’t cover all of the interesting programming topics.

t followings -l --sort=tweeted | head -10 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs t unfollow -i

There’s one thing about the Twitter limit. It gets bigger if I get more followers. In short, I need to have about the same number of followers as the number of people who follow me. I’m not far from that - there’s about 1500 people following me right now, but it’s still not enough. That’s why from time to time I need to clean up the list of people I follow. I unfollow the most silent ones, who didn’t tweet for the last year or so. It doesn’t mean I don’t care about them. If not the limit, I’d be fine. Given, my Twitter usage, though, that makes most sense. I can always follow someone again, if they get more active.

I can’t even describe how much value I get from Twitter

I’m so grateful to the people I follow. I learnt so much, I get inspired so often.

I want to give the value back to my followers. I try to be active, tweet interesting links, engage in good conversations. Teach someone. Actively listen to other people problems. Try helping.

I recommend you to try this approach. Follow more people (use Twitter search to find interesting people). Treat is a geek party. Get inspired. Engage more. Don't read everything.

If you're a programmer, you may enjoy following me - I tweet mostly about programming, JavaScript, Ruby and working from home.

(Photo credits: http://www.flickr.com/photos/romytetue/ )