A recurring respondents’ theme is “TDD is irrelevant in front-end code”. It’s easy to offer/receive this comment combatively, but I think a little more rich discussion of the factors involved might bring us to new and different positions about UI and TDD. Most folks who offer that are living in some sort of JS world: […]
TDD on the Front End Read More »
I distinguish quite strongly between “readability” and what I call “scannability”. I think that our trade’s pedagogues, even our very good ones, conflate the two, and in so doing inaccurately describe programming and ineffectively prescribe remedies. Maybe the way to approach the idea is through your experience of seeing. Humans — most vertebrates, in fact
Readability And Scannability Read More »
Aight. I been away from programming for a couple of months, but there was a reason I started talking the other day about the kontentment project: I’m wanting mucho change in it. For a talk I’m giving, I want the ability to draw human arcs, with the same ease with which I can draw human
Kontentment And Human Arcs Read More »
The “How I Work (Test-Driving Mix)” drew some questions and comment. How I Work (Test-Driving Mix) Here’s one: a respondent says, “If I write a lot of small tests and I change how a feature works, I have to change or throw out all those microtests, which is a lot of work.” (The respondent proposed
The Cost of Changing Microtests Read More »
A respondent asks, "Are you always able to practice what you preach? I don’t mean intentionally dropping but unintentionally as your mind is sloppy. I have great difficulties in applying 100% of my "knowledge" 100% of the time." Sometimes questions open up huge areas with lots of issues and subtexts and angles, and this is
How I Work – Preaching And Practicing Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: I suspect sentinel returns, and though I still use them, it’s generally because I haven’t found the right formulation yet. I’m working on the TSD project today, and I’ve got a nasty little chunk of code I wish weren’t nasty. (It’s in this file, and of course, you’re welcome to grab the whole
TDD Pro-Tip: Suspect Sentinel Returns Read More »
Refactoring Pro-Tip: When I make tacit relationships explicit I nearly always improve my code. Once I move past syntactical refactorings into semantics, this is often my first set of moves. So what does this mean, "tacit" vs "explicit", in code? Maybe the easiest way to come at it is with a very dumb example. The
TDD Pro-Tip: Make The Tacit Explicit Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: TDD-blockers are everywhere for me, even now, after twenty years of practicing it, so I still try new ways to work around them, and I don’t always find them, and I wait for next time. A respondent had a great question, and this is a kind of "sideways" answer. The question: Given that
When To Start Doing TDD Read More »
TDD Pro-Tip: The step-wise technique has to account for what the user experiences when, so I have to build ways to control that when stories get bigger than a day. (A new friend asked the question: when stories get hefty, how do we "live at HEAD" without exposing our users to code that’s still WIP.)
One Story, One Day Read More »
When I have to have WIP that’s live in production, I pretty much have to use all the approaches for side-by-side development. In some recent muses, we’ve talked about "in situ" vs "side-by-side" approaches to changing code. First, let’s refresh our concepts for these two phrases. In both cases, we have a bunch of code
Large Stories Mean Side-By-Side Technique Read More »
