Jacob Singh

http://www.kattaekwondo.com/CKTKD/Images/Karate_B-Party.jpg

Agile is great for developing software. It improves quality by committing to transparency and realistic estimates. It improves morale by putting creative people in control of their process and it gives stakeholders visibility into the process and the flexibility to change priorities (pivot for all you trendy wantrapraneurs out there).

And while Agile originated in the software industry, the principles and even the processes now exist outside of it. It works pretty well as a system in any place where there is inherent uncertainty. While traditional management methodologies seek to eliminate uncertainty by careful planning and enforcement, Agile embraces uncertainty as essential and builds teams and processes which can adapt to it.

Now think about traditional education. You have a lesson plan, you have a syllabus, the teacher assumes how will each student will absorb every lesson, how many hours of work they will need to put in to prep for a test, how best to learn each topic, etc.

The group had a really busy week. Everyone from the Services department was on hands at Acquia - So they got a chance to meet with Dries, Peter Guagenti (VP Services) as well as Bryan house (VP Marketing) and many others.

In addition, as the group was cramming to get their work done, we got iced by the PS team.

With all that extra-curricular activity, they were crammed to get their assignment in. The assignment was simple:

• Build a Drupal Gardens site as a portfolio of your work.
• Interview 5 Acquians (selected at random).
• Publish their interviews / photos on your site.
• Build a view with list and tabular displays that can filter by department.
• Make a block which showed a random Acquian.

The results where absolutely impressive. A few of these people (including Andrew - the first one below) were using Drupal for the first time! The group has since moved on, their portfolios have been moved to Acquia hosting.

Here's a few screenshots and links - check it out and get to know some Acquians and how the Ubies did on their first assignments.  

Please show the Ubies some love and comment on their blogs / follow them on twitter.

http://andrew.drupalgardens.com/interviews

If you want to blackout your site in protest of SOPA/PIPA, here's what you gotta do:

(hat tip to http://www.zachstronaut.com for the blackout page).

Important: Keep the url mysite.drupalgardens.com/admin/content handy. 

Once you follow these instructions, your site will go dark (if it is January 18th 2012).  If you want to get it back, you will need to delete the block later.

1. Navigate to Structure -> Blocks
2. Click on "Add Block"
3. In the "Body" use the dropdown to change from "Safe HTML" to "Full HTML" (the buttons will go away)
4. Make the block show by setting a region.
5. Copy the following and paste it into the body:

<script type="text/javascript">
    var a = new Date;
    if (18 == a.getDate() && 0 == a.getMonth() && 2012 == a.getFullYear()) {
        window.onload = function () {
            var cover = document.createElement('div');
            cover.style.position = 'fixed';
            cover.style.zIndex = 9999999;
            cover.style.width = window.innerWidth + 'px';
            cover.style.height = window.innerHeight + 'px';
            cover.style.top = 0;
            cover.style.backgroundColor = '#000';
            cover.innerHTML = '<iframe

The problem

Programmers are like bad criminals in cop movies.  We just like to leave clues everywhere.  Most of the time, we work much like writers, from the outside in.  Develop an outline, stub out the parts which we might get to, and then fill in the core pieces, followed by the extremities.  If you're lucky you get a quick review and edit and then off to the press.  

Often though, we leave in little todo messages like "@todo: Actually write this function" or "@todo: make sure you check for a security hole here".  Or unprofessional error messages like "oops, something didn't work" or even worse "idiotic user doesn't know how to read instructions and forgot to use lower case".  And sometimes, I've been guilty of leaving debug code in which is there for me to look at what is happening in the code, but should never be accessed by others.

In my 13 years of reading other peoples' code, I don't think I'm alone here.

Ever seen "An unexpected error has occurred" or "Oops, shouldn't have gotten here" in an application... yeah, the dev needed this.

The proposal

An extension to your version control system of choice and/or your continious integration tool which checked code for various