Technology Cafe

Yahoo ,OpenId ,Grails and me

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 31 May 2010 13:56:46 +0000

When it comes to OpenId, Yahoo has some real trust issues. Getting Yahoo to work with OpenId wasn’t difficult at all. But when I signed-in to Yahoo from my website , this is the message that greeted me

Warning: Yahoo! cannot verify this website. We recommend you do not share any personal information with this website.

For [...]

Book Review: Dont make me think

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 17:15:38 +0000

Its no easy task doing a book review for book on Web usability especially a book so well written like “Don’t make me think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug”

This book will introduce you to yourself as the web user. Granted this book is all about common sense , so you [...]

Don’t do that !!!

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:00:34 +0000

If I were to summarize my experience in Software development, that I have gathered over the last 10 years or so, it would be more of a collection of “Don’t do that” rather than “Do that”.

In other words, I have learned more from doing things incorrectly rather than doing correctly. Why? I guess simply because [...]

Changing port for Google App Engine with grails plugin

Rajiv Narula — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 22:29:04 +0000

The context

I am using Google App Engine using the Grails AppEngine plugin . The default port is 8080, but I needed to run it on a different port.

It was easy to figure out that Google App Engine supports running the development server on any configured port. But it took me some time to realize that [...]

Grails Error: Appengine is already registered

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 02:33:30 +0000

The context:

I am using Google App Engine along with Grails AppEngine plugin. At some point I started getting an exception when I was trying to start my development server. The only thing I had done before I got the error was- I had switched from App Engine SDK 1.2.5 to 1.2.8.

The solution

The problem is that [...]

CYC- Cover your code

Rajiv Narula — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 19:43:31 +0000

The most fundamental principle behind Agile is to make software in an iterative fashion. What this means is - in every iteration, you add some more business value (read features) to the product. This works smoothly only if you are committed to only “moving forward” i.e. you never break existing features- even if you have to refactor [...]

Boston User Groups- BUGs

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:10:18 +0000

These are the few user groups that I go to or keep track of regularly to see if they are discussing a topic that is of specific interest to me.

NEJUG

New England Java User group. It has been there almost for ever. They have some excellent speaker line up and its a very active user group. [...]

Dev and QA- blurring the lines

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:53:53 +0000

Few weeks ago, I was talking to Jon about how the Agile adoption has been working for us.

One of the things I talked to him that day was - my observation that the developers were scrambling to get the development done during the beginning of the sprint and then it was la-la land towards the end. And it was opposite for the testers. I found [...]

Book Review: User stories Applied

Rajiv Narula — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:57:40 +0000

Do you want to understand User stories ? You can’t go wrong with User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development by Mike Cohn .

As of this writing, out of the 45 people who reviewed this book on Amazon, 35 people have given it 5 stars and 9 have given it 4 stars. And I would [...]

Grails and OpenId

Rajiv Narula — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:25:52 +0000

Do your users a favor . Use OpenId in your website, rather than having them to create yet another user account.

I haven’t ready any statistics around this, but if I am the so called average user - I guess, I am 75% less likely to register for your website , even if that comes at [...]