"There’s no success quite like failure"

From Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up:

"This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. “I saw this happen all the time,” Dunbar says. “A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they’d be getting a little defensive, and then they’d get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they’d finally understood what was important.”

What turned out to be so important, of course, was the unexpected result, the experimental error that felt like a failure. The answer had been there all along — it was just obscured by the imperfect theory, rendered invisible by our small-minded brain. It’s not until we talk to a colleague or translate our idea into an analogy that we glimpse the meaning in our mistake. Bob Dylan, in other words, was right: There’s no success quite like failure."

Grail Projects in Hudson, Pt 2.

I just recently concluded a first sprints worth of work using Grails for the first time. We delivered.

While cutting the release, I found one additional gotcha in our CI environment. The grails application.properties file holds several key pieces of information including the version number, grails plugin versions and the last build date. This means the file must be checked into source control, but is also modified locally every build by CI (Hudson, nudge, nudge, wink wink). This caused our build to fail while bumping our project version.

1. CI will fail a grails+maven project if you change the version number of the project in the application.properties file.
   • Workaround: 1) Have your CI project perform a clean checkout instead of an update for you build. 2) At the end of your build, add a custom hook to delete the locally modified application.properties file.
   • Fix: I think have the build timestamp in this file may be a mistake as Grails grows more mature. As an improvement, it should be removed.