Sooooooo. I’m gonna write a little bit about geekery. But I do want to frame it for you a little. Geekery is not very important right now. My country is in the throes of facing down a violent uprising by uniformed militia, spurred on by parts of the government. So, geekery, no. Not important. But, […]
The economic aspects of microtest TDD are inextricably tied to the operational aspects of it. If we concentrate only on the artifacts involved, we will lose the picture and misunderstand the value proposition. As a professional geek, the heart of my job is changing rigidly structured imperative text in collaboration with other humans, in order
Microtest TDD: Economics Read More »
I want to talk about this thing where you see someone on stage/screen presenting material about geekery, you decide you’re attracted, and you send them mail or dm hitting on them. You must not do this. It is rude, unprofessional, and hurtful to many people. Stop it. There are a lot of arguments that sound
Hitting on Speakers (Rant-y) Read More »
I think of my style of coding as "microtest TDD". That can be misleading for folks, so let’s take a walk over a few of the ideas, implicit and explicit, that make up the approach. First things first, bear the money premise in mind in all that follows, to wit: "I’m in this for the
Microtest TDD: The Big Picture Read More »
More seriously, the first piece of advice I’d give a monolith-owner about converting to microservices would be to work very hard to factor their monolith well. Interestingly, across dozens of cases, I’ve never seen that advice taken. There’s always a well-dressed person with excellent powerpoint who is happy to give a compelling case for a
The Jump to Microservices Read More »
I use spikes, periods of code-changing activity that end with no pushes, all the time, at small scale and large, as a way to develop my path. It’s a vital technique, and it’s often underplayed, so let’s spend some time with it. What’s are spikes? A spike is a stretch of time I spend mucking
An Intro to Spikes Read More »
Let’s talk about steps and value. Out in the world, folks make a lot of decisions involving these ideas, they reason about them. We want to make sure our reasoning is based on a thorough understanding of the implicit premises. What’s a step? A step is a gap or space, in time and activity, in
Steps, Value, and Change-Harvesting Read More »
Lotta inspiration for junior geeks stuff floating around. I’m having a low productivity day today because, well, you know all of that, so I’ll take a minute nd pitch in. Do you know what I did for about twelve elapsed hours of coding time? I solved a problem. Cuz, you know, I got mad skillz,
Juniors And Seniors Read More »
The strategy pattern lets you make "pluggable algorithms", so clients have different behavior without having different code themselves. We often use it to capture the "consequence in code" of some condition, which we can then let other code use without re-testing the condition. Here’s a little java snippet: dimension = horizontal ? width : height
Using the Strategy Pattern Read More »
Another refactoring topic today: dealing with nulls. There are a bunch of techniques, but they amount to a) don’t, and b) do but only one time ever. The basic idea: a null always occurs in a particular context, and in that context, it has a meaning. When we pass it up or down our call-stack,
Dealing with Nulls Read More »
