MongoDB and Merlin’s Castle

Recently i have been occupying my free time writing a remake of a game i used to play at school. It is called Merlin’s Castle, and it’s a text-based adventure game where you move around in the world, picking up items to overcome obstacles. It’s great fun!

You can play Merlin’s Castle at http://merlinscastle.net.

Last week Russell Smith visited eden to pair for a day, and we got talking about MongoDB, a document oriented database. I had already been thinking about switching Merlin’s Castle to a document oriented database, so it seemed a good opportunity to try out MongoDB with Russell’s help.

I found it was very easy to switch over to MongoDB using the MongoMapper Ruby object mapper gem. I have found many benefits of switching over to MongoDB, so yesterday i did a tech talk to share how i did it, and what i learned from it.

You can watch my presentation at http://vimeo.com/17815778.

I like document oriented databases – they make a lot of sense to me. I used to work with Lotus Notes a long time ago. I also tried out CouchDB a few years ago. I’m very pleased to have an application that uses MongoDB, and i’m sure i’ll be using it again in the near future.

Welcome to Alberto Peña!

Last week eden were delighted to receive Alberto Peña as our newest intern. Alberto is a Java programmer from Spain, who has taken a leap of faith by coming to intern at eden, setting aside the comforts of a job, girlfriend, culture and language in order to experience something new. For this, i admire and respect Alberto very much.

In the first week we set a deliberately impossible challenge for Alberto: to implement rfc2616 – the HTTP server/client protocol. We stipulated that it must be developed with BDD using Cucumber and Rspec. On Friday Alberto gave a presentation of the first week’s work: a demonstration of the successful GET request. Alberto walked us through the code explaining how it works, and talked about the challenges and decisions faced during the week.

Alberto has been blogging every day, and it’s really interesting to read about life at eden seen through somebody else’s eyes. I encourage you to follow Alberto’s blog: El Programador Feliz. It’s mostly in Spanish, but if you’re not completely comfortable reading Spanish, Google Chrome should automatically offer to translate it for you.

Alberto is not being paid during this internship at eden, but there is a pledgie page in case you wish to make a donation (which goes directly to Alberto) – Help an aspiring craftsman on his journey.

Welcome, Alberto! It is a real pleasure to have you with us!

Presentation of my apprenticeship task

Here is a presentation i made to some of my colleagues on friday explaining my first apprenticeship task, my wiki, how i went about it, the problems i encountered and what i learnt from the whole experience.

See my Apprenticeship task presentation on youtube.