Plumbers make this joke on day one of having a new hire. "The first law of plumbing: shit flows downhill." That line probably pre-dates western civilization. It’s good to make a noobie kid laugh a little nervously. Agility doesn’t flow downhill. Agility doesn’t flow downhill, it perks up from below. In one sentence, this is […]
Agility Perks From Below Read More »
I write things called "microtests" to do my development. Doing this yields me greater success than I’ve had using any other technique in a 40-year career of geekery, so I advocate, wanting to share the technique far & wide. Before we can talk seriously about how or whether this works, we need a strong grasp
The Technical Meaning Of Microtest Read More »
The more I work higher up the chain, the more I encounter folks who are openly seeking success theater, w/no interest or concern for actual value. This observation blinded me for many years. I have an odd-shaped-to-some but very strong sense of personal responsibility, myself, and I am no less prone to moralizing judgments than
Success Theater, Corruption, and My Own Medicine Read More »
How long (redux)? In the technical side of the modern synthesis, we develop code by writing and passing tests then re-working the code to make it as change-enabled as we can. The key "how long" aspect to this: how long does the code stay not working? That is, how long in between the times we
How Long? (Technique Re-Mix) Read More »
Hey, it’s GeePaw, and if you’re just starting to look at TDD, refactoring, the modern technical synthesis, we need to start with a couple of minutes about the Lump Of Coding fallacy. You’re a working geek: you spend your days coding for money to add value to your company. And one day some random schmoe
TDD & The Lump Of Coding Fallacy | Video Read More »
How long? What amount of time passes between you saving the file you just changed and you seeing the results of that change? If that answer is over 10 seconds you might want to wonder if you can make it shorter. If that answer is over 100 seconds, please consider making a radical change in
The expense of an integration test can be extremely high. Consider the contentment app. This app makes drawings 1) that distribute across time, as if they were being drawn live in front of you, 2) that are generated stochastically, 3) with a "pixel-inaccessible" framework. Now, it’s important to understand that none of these problems are
TDD: Resist Integration Tests Read More »
An old blog of mine, We’re In This For The Money, recently got some attention, delighting me, of course. A full h/t to Jim Speaker @jspeaker for that! He quoted me thus: Too busy to #TDD? Too busy to pair? Too busy to #refactor? Too busy to micro-test? I call bullshit. My buddy Erik Meade
My TDD Isn’t Judging Your Responsibility Read More »
A coding pattern; replace supplied data with a supplier or a supplier with the supplied data. It is very common to create code with an interface like this: do( Data supplied ) We then use the data somehow to perform our functionality, whatever a do(…) method does. On the other hand, sometimes we create code
Use Supplier Or Supplied Or Both? Read More »
Maybe the real first wrong was the slide into "method" in the first place. Have you ever known yourself to behave in a way that is generally perceived as neutral or even positive, but in a way that is actually doing you or others harm? Depressive Solitaire My work makes me think a lot. And
Methods Don’t Create Health Read More »
