Because I did not plan to post this article in this blog, it is in German. This should be an exception. Sorry for the English readers.

Die letzte Woche habe ich im Silicon Valley verbracht. Mit einer Gruppe von 12 Leuten haben wir verschiedene Firmen und Organisationen besucht. Hier zähle ich ein paar wild zusammengewürfelte persönliche Eindrücke auf:

1. Die zwei heissesten Themen in US-Firmen sind Cloud Computing und Green IT.
2. Trotz Green IT ist die durchschnittliche Temperatur im Sitzungszimmer nie höher als 18°. Warme Kleidung ist empfohlen.
3. Je niedriger die Temperatur im Sitzungszimmer, desto grösser das Unternehmen.
4. Die NASA arbeitet mit Original-Anlagen aus den 50er-Jahren. Gut amortisiert!
   

   Von Silicon Valley Tour 2009

5. Google ist jene Firma, welche am häufigsten unsere Fragen mit “I cannot comment on that” beantwortet hat.

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Regarding the topic “optimizing page-loading-times” too many people still set the focus only on the server-side, ignoring the fact that most of the loading time is spent getting all the components of the page(CSS, JavaScript, images, ads).
The yahoo performance-team proved this very well.

Also, pages (like tilllate.com) more often make heavy use of JavaScript with the goal of providing a better user experience. The problem is, that most developers work on modern hardware and develop on their favourite web browser – which is usually a recent one. They forget that a big amount of visitors still surf with their first computer bought 7 years ago at Interdiscount and is mostly surfing on the developers least favourite browser (like IE 6). As a result, those visitors often do not get the optimal user-experience and the website loses traffic (=money).

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Are you enthusiastic about web technologies? Do you have strong PHP, Javascript and SQL skills? Would you like to work with a team of smart and passionate people? Are you open to advanced development methodologies like Scrum or Test Driven Development? Would you like help further develop one of the biggest Swiss website?

Then you should apply for a job at tilllate.com: Our team is looking for dedicated web developers. You’ll find more information in our job ad:

• Web developer (English)
• Web-Entwickler (Deutsch)

Four weeks have passed since the last sprint planning meeting. Sprint number two has come to an end. It’s time for the sprint retrospective.

The motivation for the sprint retrospective is:

• Visualize the accomplishment – important for the team morale
• Review any impediments and discuss measures on how to avoid them in the next sprint

Here’s how we are structuring the sprint retrospecives:

The set up

The team and the product owner are allocating one hour in the meeting room. We’re looking at the wall with the task board showing the user stories, the burn down chart and the impediment backlog. This is a big paper with a post it for every impediment encountered during the sprint. We collected the impediments during the bi-weekly scrum meetings (aka daily scrum).

Visualize the achievements

First, I go through all done user stories and say a few words about every story. Time for praising the team. Developers often think “we haven’t achieved anything”. So it’s important to visualize the finished user stories.

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I recently had to take over an unfinished project. It was an AJAX control to select multiple friends as you can find it on Facebook.

“It’s 99% complete”, I was told. Yeah, right. I counted 2 story points (without looking at the code). Soon I knew I was too optimistic: Classes calling other classes without logic. Randomly named variables. Data, creation of DOM elements, AJAX calls spread all over the place:

Architecture before refactoring (dramatized)

That’s not going to be easy. To make things worse: I am a Javascript beginner. What I did up to now was procedural Javascript code.

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The first sprint is done! Yes we finally started doing Scrum at tilllate.com*. Well, it’s not exactly how Schwaber and Sutherland would expect it. But our way fits our team. And the acceptance in both the IT team and the rest of the organization is high. It improves motivation and therewith the performance of the team. And that’s what matters.

Sprint planning meeting

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This week, there was another webtuesday with lightning talks in Zürich. Leo and I each did a little talk:

“StubidDB” by Leo

Leo still dreaming about dumber databases. His own creation StupidDB might sound familiar to you…

“I’m in Ur Browzerz…” by Maarten

Harry had the idea to locate your users based on their history. I tried it out, giving another 8 minutes of fame to an old and well-known hack. The slides can be found here.

All I needed to do was renaming Trevi_Auth to Tilllate_Auth. Sure, it affected some 41 files, but that’s nothing a little bit of search & replace can’t do. The big headache started when I ran the unit tests.

Shuffle Unit Tests = Fail.

It’s absolutely amazing how much you can mess up unit tests just by changing their order! (Trevi_* comes after Tilllate_*) Everyone knows that tests are supposed to be independent. But we all know how it is. People get lazy, mocks are complicated and testing is boring anyway. And don’t forget about that cool pattern called “Singleton” that we’ve all read about in an inflight magazine!

Punish Me!

Obviously we can’t do testing right without getting beaten with a stick. So where’s that stick? Is there a way to reset all static variables in PHP? Is there a PHPUnit hack that forks a separate PHP process for each test?

What is your solution to keep your tests from sticking together like spit ? I’m happy to learn about it!

When displaying an e-mail address on a website you obviously want to obfuscate it to avoid it getting harvested by spammers. But which obfuscation method is the best one? I drove a test to find out. Here are the results:

In 2006 I opened nine different e-mail addresses. On this page I published the nine e-mail addresses. But every address has been obfuscated by a different method. I made sure it’s getting indexed by Google by putting a link to that page on the tilllate.com homepage.

Then I waited 1.5 years (see the original post).

For each e-mail address I counted the amount of spam I received. The amount of spam received started by 21MB (for no obfuscation and a total of over 1800 spam mails) and went down to absolutely no spam.

The following three methods are absolutely rock-solid and keep your addresses safe from the harvesters.
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“unit testing is a test that validates that individual units of source code are working properly”, that’s what Wikipedia says about unit testing. That’s general knowledge.

But what motivates me even more than the increased software quality is that it saves me development time. This sounds odd as you might believe that TDD means writing more code.

Here’s a real-life example:
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