Bouncing ideas

I had the great opportunity to participate in creativity and brainstorming trainings. When I first learned about brainstorming, we were taught the following rules:

1. say whatever you have in mind
2. the quantity is better than the quality
3. don't judge
4. you can copy on your fellows

This last rule is really interesting and was fairly reused in the creativity training I had 3 years ago (with a faboulous company: Synectics). It is the contrary of school (at least the french one)! Why not elaborate on other people ideas and catalyze new ones?

This why I feel great when I see that 2 of my recent blogs found an echo on the web. When I writed about the "attitude" of software testing, I wasn't aware that other people were already working on that matter, and they call that approach "Behaviour-driven development". This is not a revolution, just a different way of looking at the software we develop.

Similarly, I had heard a lot about Ruby on Rails and its ActiveRecord framework, but I just realized, reading Graham Glass's blog, that part of RoR popularity is certainly related to its support for associations and compositions. It really itches me to download Ruby and start using it. I wish I could have all these facilities of declaring properties such as "belongs_to" or "has_many" in Java.

So now, my only wish is that I have enough time to add my grain of salt to those developments,...