Turning implicit understanding into explicit code is a great productivity & quality step. Let’s talk about some whys and hows for that idea. As we forge into the topic, please do remember, this is just comfort food, not the main story. I proudly support my friends & family who are working for change in the […]
Turning Implicit into Explicit Read More »
Let’s talk about steps, a topic that’s relevant to my geekery interests, and maybe even a little relevant to the world outside of geekery today. (I feel weird writing right now. I am going to do it anyway, primarily because, like most long-term sufferers from illness, I live in mortal fear of relapse, and part
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 »
What’s a microtest, anyway? I write a ton of tests as I’m building code, and the majority of these are a particular kind or style of test, the microtest kind. Let’s talk about what I mean by that, today, then we’ll talk later about how that turns out to help me so much. A microtest
Microtest TDD: More Definition 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 »
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 »
I shipped a word processor that formatted the hard drive every 1024 saves. Must have been ’84 or ’85. I was a bright 25-year-old with about five years in the game. I was one of two programmers who wrote & maintained a suite of apps kinda like Office: spreadsheet, wp, database, plotter, such like. We
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 »
