Tomorrow would be better

A quote from Sergey Brin taken from Seth Godin's The Dip:

We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.

Doesn't mean that you'll never ship it!

Auto reload Rails plugin

One day we all need to quickly get that plugin to work our way. But plugin development can be painful with restarting the server all the time.

Here is how to reload Rails plugin on every request on Rails 2.3.

1. Add "config.reload_plugins = true" on config/environment.rb. It has to be there, you can't put it on config/environments/development.rb due to the Rails start up steps. You may add "if RAILS_ENV = 'development'" instead.
   

   
     # config/environment.rb
     config.reload_plugins = true
   

2. On the plugin's init.rb, add the following line:
   

   
     # init.rb
     ActiveSupport::Dependencies.explicitly_unloadable_constants = 'YourPluginModuleName'
   

   
   

That's all. Don't forget to remove it when you're done.

Defining milestones

Apparently my brain can remember the gist quite well while forgetting the source. Before I forget again:

For picking the milestones there is only one relevant rule. Milestones must be concrete, specific, measurable events, defined with knife-edge sharpness. Coding, for a counterexample, is "90 percent finished" for half of the total coding time. Debugging is "99 percent complete" most of the time. "Planning complete" is an event one can proclaim almost at will.

Concrete milestones on the other hand, are 100-percent events. "Specifications signed by architects and implementers," "source coding 100 percent complete, keypunched, entered into disk library", "debugged version passes all test cases". These concrete milestones demark the vague phases of planning, coding, debugging. (Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering)