Posts

I spent a little (longer than I thought… maybe 2 hours?) implementing Tic-Tac-Toe in the TDD As If You Mean It style. Ended up with a VERY different implementation than I ever would have done if I just “started coding” – everything was only in one class, including the AI to “play” against itself. Observations: It was quite different to implement things inside the test method. I ended up coding like it "does something..." do player = Player.new def player.something # do work end player.something.should be_true end It was difficult to not refactor as I went. Many times I would see the duplication and want to refactor immediately. I resisted this urge until I felt the implementation was done, then refactored out duplication, ensuring that the tests continued to pass after each change. I’m still not quite sure how you’re supposed to improve design without breaking the rules. Doing pure method move seems limiting and doesn’t allow for you to see duplication. The only thing I could think of is that there can be additional refactoring after you’re “done” All in all, a very interesting exercise. I want to do it now on something broader, and eventually on something that has a core with a wrapper so that the core is purely TDD’d and the wrapper is thin, but swappable. I think Dominion is my next big attempt.

I’m interested in creating a culture of pairing… not just in my workplace, but in my life. I want to be able to pair with people in order to improve on the skills I alread have. This is seen clearly in the relatively new #pairwithme ‘micro-movement’ that is happening on twitter. It shows that people want to learn from each other and improve their craft. But it doesn’t have to apply solely to programming. Last weekend I “paired” with a neighbor to fix my lawnmower. He is a bit more mechanically inclined than I was, but it took both of our efforts and problem solving to diagnose and fix the problem. All in all, a worthwhile time where I improved both my relationship with Ben and my ability to cut my grass. He got something out of it too, he felt great and is excited to tackle more mechanical projects. This is exactly the same reasons we talk about the benefits pairing in the first place. ...

When pairing, especially remotely with someone you don’t work professionally with, it is sometimes helpful to have some ideas about how to go about getting the session going or what to do. This is just a set of ideas that might get the ball rolling. Problems to work on PuzzleNode - 15 shortish (30 minutes to 4 hour) problems. Great for pairing. Conway’s Game of Life - Can implement a basic version quickly. Lots of ideas for restrictions on this site. TDD Katas - Can be done in 30 minutes alone. Dominion - A larger problem, but it will tease out larger design issues that you don’t get with smaller systems. Build a Twitter - Simple system that can be extended. Adding a UI and continuing strict TDD is very interesting since you might be able to TDD the core system, but have more difficulty with the surrounding. Are there ways to mitigate the risks of using a framework as a shell? Are there ways to make the shell “swappable” – not so you’d actually swap, but so you have loose coupling? Ideas to practice Ping Pong - Pair back and forth, one writes a failing test, one makes it pass, then writes the next failing test, and so on. Various Limitations - No loops, no conditionals, limit lines per method, no voice communication (or typing out in chat… only communication is through code) TDD As If You Mean It - Strict TDD that involves real tests before code and strict refactoring rules. This can be combined with any other limitation or idea, but it’s so difficult (And rewarding) that it’s okay to Just Do This. Tools Vim + tmux - how to tmux · tmux basics screencast · Syme · easy ssh/public key auth Screen Sharing - ScreenHero · Google+ (read only) Audio - Skype · Google+ Find Pairs - RubyPairs · IRC #pairwithme · Twitter #pairwithme

I’ve used various IDEs for the last 10 years of development. Started with Eclipse while developing in Java. Switched to TextMate when I moved to a Mac and started developing in Ruby. Eventually, TextMate’s development became stale and things other people were able to do with their editors started to look good. I began searching, and even bought a license for Sublime Text 2. It had a lot of what I was looking for, but what I wanted was an editor that let me never leave my keyboard unless I wanted to and had good integration points. I’d love a good fullscreen mode since I’m a bit of a FullScreen addict on Mac. ...

I thought it would be interesting to take a snapshot of a full, timed spec run every month or so and post it. Who knows, sometime I might look at this and think “13.7 seconds! THAT’S FOREVER” – Or I might look at it and say “13.7 seconds! I Wish!” I also have been pushing to improve the coverage by 1% ever 2-3 days (That’s roughly 10-20 additional covered lines). My goal is to get to 85% and stop. Lots of stuff doesn’t need to be tested and lots of stuff is “covered” but not actually tested properly. Testing is hard. ...

Update: While it’s good to understand what you’re doing, this template file will get you so that after you get your app running, cap deploy:setup and cap deploy:cold works, assuming you have the host set up properly and have your app’s main directory cleared of all files. Everybody Loves Dreamhost, but… Dreamhost is a great little hosting company, but it really lags when it comes to keeping the latest software up to date. It’s version of Ruby is 1.8.7 and the latest stable version of Rails they have running is 3.0.3. That release is technically in “security fix” mode. Ugh. ...

I recently needed to display a few contextual numbers near each other in a web app. I’ve taken to liking the twitter bootstrap ‘badges’ for little informational numbers, especially with the color coding that badge-important, badge-info, and badge-success provide. Easy ways to quickly communicate not only the number, but a hint at what it means. The problem is that when you put a bunch of badges right next to each other, you get kindof a mess. ...

I have lots of lists on my new site that we want to show ‘only the first 5’ items on, but allow people to expand to see them all if they want. It’s common enough that I’d like to have an easy way to do it. Bonus points if it’s non-obtrusive. jQuery -> $('ul.show-more').each -> if $(this).find('li').length > 5 $(this).find('li:gt(4)').hide().end().append( $('<li><a href="#">Show More...</a></li>').click -> $(this).siblings(':hidden').show().end().remove() ) Now all I have to do is drop into my favorite haml template and bang out a list ...

I’ve been working on a new project and decided to use CarrierWave to handle image uploads (and minor automatic manipulation). Everything looked great, but then my new boss, who has a penchant for finding the one or two things wrong with your latest well-tested feature uploaded a JPEG that looked fine in Preview, but automatically rotated on upload. After checking through the directory, it seemed that only the processed images were getting rotated. Actually, ‘rotated’ is a misnomer, they were actually just losing their orientation. JPEGs have EXIF meta data that can contain the orientation of a picture, no matter how it’s stored. This allows cameras to store everything as a 640x480, but display some in the reverse (480x640). The only thing different when the camera writes the image is what orientation the gyroscope adds to the meta data. ...

Recently, in my new project, I decided to take the DCI approach that Mike Pack outlined, which has been really cool. I’ve been able to keep my tests fast, and have very distinct buckets to put data (models), specific roles of that data (rather than cluttering up the models), and an easy way to take a use case and map it out programatically (contexts). I noticed that I was generating roles and contexts regularly and copying from previously written code examples so I decided to make role and context generators. The process wasn’t bad, but it did take a couple of steps that took a little digging to understand. ...