Just noticed that the Agile Alliance Group that I has created in LinkedIn is growing massively. We have 1403 members so far. If you believe in Agile, join this group and show your support.

To join this group on LinkedIn click the following link: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/37631/0FF74232FB92 (You’ll need a LinkedIn Id. If you don’t have one you can always create one for free)

I hope joining this group will activate the consciousness of belonging to the Agile community as a network.

I’m trying to install restful_authentication plugin on a rails project on a Windows platform.

Every time I try “ruby script\plugin install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/”

I get the following error:

Plugin not found: ["http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/"]

This really does not help. When you pass the verbose parameter to the install command, it give a more meaningful error message.

ruby script\plugin -v install http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/
Plugins will be installed using http fetching from ‘http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/’
Plugin not found: ["http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/plugins/restful_authentication/"]
# openuri::httperror: /openuri::httperror:

When you search for this error, it becomes very clear that its a proxy issue. Following is the solution given by Nick Chistyakov

This `407 Proxy Authentication Required’ happens because along with proxy address and proxy port two additional params must by supplied:
1. user
2. password

In open-uri.rb (under \ruby\lib\ruby\1.8 folder), method OpenURI.open_http, line 216 there is a record:
klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy.host, proxy.port)

The full signature of that Net::HTTP::Proxy(…) method is:
def Net::HTTP.Proxy(p_addr, p_port = nil, p_user = nil, p_pass = nil)
So just add proxy.user, proxy.password:

klass = Net::HTTP::Proxy(proxy.host, proxy.port, proxy.user, proxy.password)

Note that your environment variable http_proxy must be set in a way it described above (http_proxy=http://user:password@host:port)

Why do companies spend enormous efforts in vain searching for “Best Practices”? Development Best Practices, Deployment Best Practices, Best Design Practices, Language Best Practices and so on….

I really feel uncomfortable when people talk about Best Practices. A lot of times we get stuck up in coming up with “best practices” as if they were final or ultimate. The whole point about Agile is, software development approaches are not static or final, we keep evolving and emerging. If something by nature is dynamic, evolving and emerging how can we say this is best? IMHO “best practices” exist only for a given context at a point in time (seconds). As soon as the time is over or the context has changed its no longer best.

Personally I prefer calling it “Better Practices”. For Ex: This practice in this context is better than the one we were using before this and hopefully tomorrow there will be a slight variation or a different practice which would be better than the one we are using today. There is no best, its only better.

Alexey has complied the Agile Ukraine Gathering report. (English version)

During the IV Agile Ukraine Gathering, I gave a quick talk on Distributed Agile. The presentation is based on my learning from the last 5 years. Most of my experience is derived by working on Distributed Projects at ThoughtWorks and the credit should go to ThoughtWorks.

http://www.slideshare.net/nashjain/distributed-agile/ 

Also you can see the other slides from the conference here: http://www.slideshare.net/krivitsky/slideshows

I arrived in Mumbai after spending a week in Kiev, Ukraine. I was invited to Ukraine by Alexey Krivitsky to conduct a two day Uncertification workshop called XP Days Ukraine and to speak at the Fourth Agile Ukraine Gathering. Big Thanks to Alexey for organizing this wonderful wonderful visit. Also big thanks to GlobalLogic for hosting me in Ukraine and Agile Alliance for funding my travel.

I was pleasantly surprised with the awesome infrastructure in Kiev and with friendly people around. Most of the people I met during my workshop and during the Agile Ukraine Gathering, amazed me with their smartness and knowledge. Even though the IT industry is a new booming industry out there, people’s knowledge and maturity was very high. Based on my 6 day stay there, I feel Kiev is a lot more advanced that any city in India. There is also a lot of work in progress. I would assume in 2-3 years time, Kiev would be one of the world’s most advanced cities.

The roads are very well built, just like roads in US. Telecommunication and Electricity seems to be very well planned. It was a 5 mins job to get a new cell phone connection with international dialing. This would take a week in India. Quite a lot of mobile service providers with really good service. In any part of the city you have good signals. Most people have high speed cable internet at home. Everyone has cable TV with a set-top box. I’ve been told that there are no power cuts. Some southern parts of Ukraine have water issues, but Kiev does not have any such issues.

Based on my understanding there are enough education institutes in Kiev to cater to the needs of the local population. A lot of people from other parts of Ukraine also come there for education and job. I was told that Kiev is not the only such city in Ukraine, there are at least 5 other cities which are equally well developed.

IT is a relatively new industry out there. There are really smart people who like to be in the IT industry. Also in the IT industry jobs pay a lot more (may be 5 times more) than what employees get paid in a factory. My understanding is that Developers with 5+ years of work-x are difficult to find. Also similar issue on the management side. Not many people around with lots of experience to guide the development teams. Having said that the guys I met are the kind of people I would like to hire. There were about 30 people I would blindly hire. Really really smart guys and gals. Most of these folk work as team leads for leading outsourcing companies out there. Also a lot of these folks understand and practice Agile but are frustrated because their clients or managers don’t get it. If you are looking to start a new office, I think Kiev is a great location.

One Hryvnia or Grivna (Ukrainian Currency) is about 8 Indian Rupee or 5 Grivna is about one US Dollar. Compared to Indian standards the cost of living is quite high in Kiev. Because of this and the fact that IT is a booming industry the salaries are quite comparable to the salaries of highest paid developers in India. A good salary for an experience developer in Ukraine is about 12,000 Grivna ($2500) per month after taxes. (They have some crazy tax rules and most people have found a loop whole in the system to avoid taxes).

Right now Ukraine has a lot of outsourced (not just off-shored) work from Denmark, few other European countries and many be a very few US projects. The time difference between most of the European countries and Ukraine is about 1-2 hours. So its quite easy to ignore the timezone issue. But Language is still a bit of an issue. Most people in the IT industry can understand English well. Most of them can also speak quite fluently. But if you would go to a store or restaurant, not many people can speak English. Most of the menus, sign-boards and hoardings are in Ukrainian. So Language can be a bit of a challenge, but not as big as it would be with China. I could survive for a week, I think others can also.

Local Transportation is quite well organized in Kiev. There are buses, subways, taxis, tramp train and long distance trains. In spite of having so many options for transportation, the buses can get quite loaded during peak hours. The subway is not very well connected to all parts of the city and hence most people use either the local buses or drive their own cars. One of the really nice things about the buses is they are environment friendly. They run on electricity instead of petrol or gas. All the streets have electric cables from which these buses draw electricity. Also in terms of the cars you can see on the road, you’ll find a huge variety of cars. The city is loaded with European cars. They also have a few Japanese car and quite a lot of Chevy cars. Chevrolet brought Daewoo which had a local manufacturing unit in Ukraine and hence you see Chevy.

Food is quite bland from an Indian standard. I could not survive without Tabasco (hence the blog title). Every restaurant I went, I had to explicitly ask for Tabasco sauce. (I’m really glad that in most of the places it was available). Also for Vegetarians it might be a little difficult to find food in most places. There are restaurants that serve pastas, salads, soups and pizzas that can keep the Vegetarians happy. On the last day, we did find an Indian Restaurant called Himalaya. The food was yummy. (Ummm…I love Indian Food).

One other thing that caught my attention was electronic signboards on the highway which show you the max speed, weather info and other usual stuff. I have never seen weather info on similar signboards. I think its a great idea.

Look what I found….

Currently I’m suffering from massively over-committing to conferences, community building activities and open source. With one conference every month and commitment on few open source projects, I’m finding it really hard to fulfill my full time job @ Directi. After thinking about this for a couple of weeks, I have decided the following:

• No more conferences for Naresh Jain in 2009 and possible 2010. I might attend may be one conference just to stay in touch with folks. I need to focus on working in the trenches and continue learning and innovating. Right now I feel I’m getting quite hands-off.
• I’m taking a temporary part-time break from Directi for the next 4-5 months. I’ll still continue to be an employee of Directi and I’ll also spend 1.5 to 2 weeks a month working within Directi. But my involvement on their products will be drastically reduced from leading some aspects of the project to consulting on them until these 4-5 months.
• For the next 4-5 months to sustain myself I’ll be open to consulting/training for 3-5 days a month. Hopefully this can fund me for the series of conferences that I’ve signed up for this year.
• In 2008, I’m already over booked, so starting now, I’m refusing all new offers to speaker at conferences.
• Over time, I’ll reduce my commitment on ASCI activities. I’ll try to keep my involvement to a minimum, mostly a coordinator/contact point for some activities.
• I’ll continue contributing to all the open source projects that I’m involved with, but over a period of time I might reduce the number of projects I’m involved with.
• I’ll continue to play customer role for the Penn State project, but hopefully I’ll be done with it in May.

If you have any suggestions or ideas to help me, please feel free to guide this blind man