Ammu Kutty

My Balu has become a boy not toddler anymore yaay...He likes to play baseball, swim, have playdate with his friends , I am proud of my baby... He knew all the 50 states in USA ,I like when he says it like a rhyme "Alabama ,Alaska...." , now thats my favorite rhyme ...He likes to play baseball with his dad , its their father son time...I can't ask of more, I thank God for all this sweet memories..One of his favorite activity is to say "blah blah ...." in phone voicemail...kind of annoying sometimes;)

Balu my little cute Balu

Today Balu was really very good boy.....he always kept me busy thats the way he used to be always.....it makes me feel so active and burns my calories...

He will sit in his rocker and will rock n roll.....he will ask for "tom tom.."(i.e tom &jerry) he will observe tom chasing jerry and will say "amma amma"(means beating tom) and after some time he will ask "boss....cool" (i.e superstar Rajini 's film Sivaji)
Today my hubby called me in phone to discuss about our new apartment at the time Balu kutty started to cry "phone.....phone ammma" then he wont stop until I give the phone in his little hands.....then I put in speaker so that we both could talk...

Premiership 2008 - Comon You Red Devils

It is that time of the year, getting really excited on start of hopefully another glorious campaign for Manchester United.

Imagining Ronaldo, Rooney, Scholes, Giggs, Nani, Anderson and of course Tevez in a team, this is dream team stuff.

Totally forgot to mention about Owen (not the crocked ex-Liverpudlian)... Hargreaves and Carrick sitting behind, breaking the opponents attacks and feeding off to this magnificent bunch of attackers is going to be a sight to behold.

Another piece of news which got me excited today was the squad numbers that were released. It was great to see the traitor Heinze booted out of the number '4' jersey. Surprised that Tevez got '32'. I was thinking he might get '8', but who am i to comment.. I will be more than happy when he scores 32 goals this season.

I was reading an article in skysports. Their reporters were giving their prediction for the coming season.. All 20 of them tipped United for the title. Why wont they, looking at the strength and depth of the squad.

With title being sorted already :-), the next interesting question to answer is who will be the player of the season. Will it be Ronaldo again? Or is it Rooney's turn this time? Or will the rhino Tevez outshine everyone, Or will it be the old foxes Scholes and Giggs? or will it be the rock-solid Owen? My bet is on Cristiano doing it again.. He is an awesome talent and i will tip him for world player of the year too..

This brings me to the next important question, The Champions League.. That as usual is going to be based on luck more than anything else.. One thing is for sure there wont be 3 English teams in the semis. I think Real and Barca could be good, with both making some astute signings.. If Kaka remains with them, Milan will be strong too. My bet is Real, Barca, Milan and United in the semis and from there United to win with Ronaldo outscoring Thierry in the final.

What a great season it will be with all this happens.. But this squad is far more stronger than most of the squads we have had in the recent past.. So if we did it in 99, we can do it again in 08..

Good Luck Guys!! Come On You Red Devils

My First Day Agile Programming

Today was the first day i started doing Test First Development. I had been thinking that i was doing TDD for the past couple of months. After my TDD training during the last 3 days, i realised that all i had been doing was just glorified unit testing and not TDD.

I used to have a pre-conceived class diagram and the methods which should be present in a class and then go about writing Junit and Java classes in parallel. What i learnt and was a bit surprised to learn was TDD was nothing but it..

I started working on a web application today and wanted to give what i learnt a shot. The application was a typical web-app. There was a screen which had a list of search results. On clicking on a row, it was supposed to bring the details of the entry..

Typically i would have started off with a basic class diagram and a sequence diagram (if time permits) and then would have set out coding... Today i did the opposite...

- I first came up with the list of test cases.. I was surprised to come up with 24 high level test cases for what seemed a not so complex problem

- Then picked up the smallest test case.. This is what Brian Button taught me in my class. Start off with a small test case and then build towards the complex ones..

- I wrote a test which did not even compile.

- Then did just enough to make sure the test compiles.. Then ran the test and saw it failing. But that's what you expect..

- Then wrote a hard-coded implementation to make the test pass..

- Kept doing up to three tests until i saw a pattern emerging.. The way interfaces emerge out of nowhere and a beautiful inheritance tree emerge was so pleasing to see.

- By end of the day i had a working system of high quality.. Not all tests were implemented, but the ones that were implemented was beautiful to see..

Compared to my last 7 years of Java experience, it would have at least taken 3 - 4 days before i started coding and within 3 to 4 hours of coding, i would have changed my design at least a little bit... It really does make sense developing this way.

I gave the estimate for this work before the agile class. It was assuming an RUP way of development. It will be interesting to see how much effort i actually take with this approach.

I should also try to learn how i do TDD f0r the code that lives close to the persistence layer. I am not sure how to get that done.. If anyone has any ideas do post it in here...

Thanks for reading, am sure i will be posting more of my experiences...