Seth Petry-Johnson is practicing the art of the possible.

Show Notes:

• Book: The Art of the Possible
• The elephant joke is actually a quote from Creighton Abrams, who was a general in the United States Army

Seth Petry-Johnson is on Twitter

Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

Charles Husemann is collecting data about agile processes.

Show Notes:

• Rational Unified Process (RUP)
• Waterfall development lifecycle
• Scrum.org
• Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
• Extreme Programming (XP)
• Podcast 042 - Arthur Doler on Retrospectives
• DREAM: Data Rules Everything Around Me (dolla dolla bill ya'll [mildly NSFW])
• NoEstimates: Phew. Where to start. Maybe Ron Jeffries blog post about NoEstimates.
• Velocity
• Hawthorne Effect
• Microsoft research paper about TDD: Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams [PDF]
• "Uncle Bob" refers to Robert C. Martin
• The Agile Manifesto
• Book: Coaching Agile Teams: A Companion for ScrumMasters, Agile Coaches, and Project Managers in Transition
• Gaming Nexus

Charles Husemann is on Twitter

Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

Arthur Doler talks about retrospectives and how to make them better.

Note that this was recording at the Indy.Code() conference in a hallway, so the audio may be a bit noisier than usual.

Also, SPECIAL THANKS to the great David Giard (who has been on the show before: Episode 6 and Episode 15, and he's also the host of the excellent Techology and Friends show, of which my podcast is a pale imitation) who gave me some new podcasting equipment that I used in this episode. I am extremely grateful, but I'm still trying to figure out how best to use this equipment (which may be obvious in this episode).

Show Notes:

• Book: Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
• Hidden Brain by Shankar Vedantam
  • Hidden Brain podcast on NPR
  • Hidden Brain book
• Book: You Are No So Smart by David McRaney
• Arthur was kind enough to give his email address in the podcast if you want to contact him.

Arthur Doler is on Twitter.

Want to be on the next episode? You can! All you need is the willingness to talk about something technical.

Theme music is "Crosscutting Concerns" by The Dirty Truckers, check out their music on Amazon or iTunes.

I blogged last year about my switch from Markdown to AsciiDoc, and that I was using AsciiDocFX.

I still like AsciiDoc, but AsciiDocFX has been getting on my nerves:

• It doesn't have a very good update system. It checks for new versions, but it seems like I have to a) uninstall the old version, b) reinstall the new version, otherwise I get problems. I may be doing it wrong, but this made me want to update less.
• The UI is a little wonky. The live preview sometimes seem to keep its update a few keystrokes behind, meaning that the preview and the document are out of sync. It also tends to get locked up, until I click the Restore button and then Maximize button.

Still, I used it.

But, I built a new computer this week. And I've been setting up my softwares on it. I thought it might be worthwhile to see if there's an AsciiDoc plugin for Visual Studio Code. And, of course there was, because apparently the Code extension ecosystem is booming!

So, I installed AsciiDoc by Joao Pinto, since it came with a live preview. But, it requires me to actually install the asciidoc command line tool.

See?

So, I thought, that should be easy enough. I went to the AsciiDoc site and started following the directions for Windows installation.

Install Ruby

Okay, well now I need to install Ruby. Should be easy enough. I already have Chocolatey NuGet, so I'll just run choco install ruby. No problem. I know that ruby comes with gem, so I should be all set.

Install AsciiDoc

According to AsciiDoc... docs... I just use gem install asciidoctor and that should do the trick.

But, no. It's not that easy. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing this blog. I got an error message:

SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 state=SSLv3 read server certificate B: certificate verify failed

I'm sure all you Ruby people or Mac people or whatever already know where this is going, but I had no clue. So I googled it. I found a whole bunch of suggestions on StackOverflow. Some solutions made sense but weren't for Windows, and vice versa. I eventually hit upon some random guy's Gist and SSL upgrades on rubygems.org which lead to me this page on rubygems.org about SSL updates.

Fixing RubyGems Certificate Thingy

So, following that literally:

gem install --local C:\rubygems-update-2.6.7.gem

and then

update_rubygems --no-ri --no-rdoc

and finally

gem uninstall rubygems-update -x

So, I guess that fixed... something? It's described in the gist I linked above. But I don't really understand why it's still a problem for a brand new install of ruby. Not complaining! It worked!

Okay, now Install AsciiDoc

So now gem install asciidoctor works. And now I get a live preview of AsciiDoc in Visual Studio Code.

I'll report back after some more time blogging to see if I like this, or if I eventually go back to AsciiDocFx.

UPDATE: As of early April 2017, I've been blogging this way and I'm extremely happy with it. Visual Studio Code keeps getting better, the preview plugin keeps getting better. I've had to introduce a few tweaks in my process, but I've got the whole pipeline semi-automated. It's easy to bring in code samples (thanks to AsciiDoc), easy to post to both the Couchbase blog and this blog, easy to run Yoast on it, and so on. Some day I'll write a blog post explaining the whole process (and hopefully get some good suggestions for streamlining!)

Welcome to another "Weekly Concerns". This is a post-a-week series of interesting links, relevant to programming and programmers. You can check out previous Weekly Concerns posts in the archive.

• The EFF is trying to make emails to Congress more effective. Traditionally, hand-written letters have always been seen as more effective. Let's see if this has any effect.
• WatchMojo's Top 10 Business Killed by the Internet.
• 8-bit maps of cities.
• Some rants about potentially inflammatory words or phrases when talking about software, from Jeremy Miller

If you have an interesting link that you'd like to see in Weekly Concerns, leave a comment or contact me.