Posts from 22 November 2014
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Today's partner: Ron
All the coffee in the world could barely get me through this week. It was fine, in the end; there's been a much more relaxed feeling on the two Fridays we've had so far. (We're 16% through the program already. What the hell.)
Most of the day was about rspec, the main ruby testing framework. It's actually a really nice language: a language for pedantic testing, by pedantic testers. Tommy joked/not joking that they re-write major portions of the syntax every 3-4 months, and I can totally believe it. When you're as steeped in the mindset of testing software as they have to be, your inclination has got to be to make your domain-specific language as polished as you can.
I do wonder what their internal unit tests look like, though.
Other than endless coffee and jokes about writing a test that you yourself are going to be taking, the day/language were interesting. I really like the rspec syntax; once you get used to the grammar, it's actually quite clear to read. It took a mere two hours last night to be able to figure out all I needed to understand to complete the practice assessment. As hard as it was, I got the impression that I understood a bit more this morning than a lot of the other students, so maybe I'm primed to be thinking in the way that the rspec designers do.
We skipped through the practice exercises, basically doing just enough coverage to make sure we were getting the point. We could tell how much clearer it makes problem solving: break something down into discrete parts, then figure out where those parts should live and how they should interact, and 90% of the hardest work is behind you. I really look forward to using the TDD methodology on a more robust project; it's quite clear that, like so many other student projects, the power of the tool we learned today far exceeds the significance of the work we were doing. It's basically like using a sledgehammer to drive a nail into drywall.
A couple things I put together today:
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No one I've worked with or talked to so far has nearly the level of paranoia about breaking things that I do. I think Bruce Schneier is right that the security mindset is probably something you mostly can't train.
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As I've mentioned, this also makes me a bit overcautious. It might behoove me to look for employers than want careful, deliberate work done, or to force myself to make fast, dumb code, and refactor much faster than I do.
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All of a sudden today, I understood what all the comments that I've read about "unit tests" and "integration tests" meant. There was a total "aha" moment when we were talking about mocks where I was like, duh, of course that's a thing, and now the difference between these other things makes perfect sense. Maybe I hadn't thought about it before?
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It's ridiculously easy to write code when you are writing tests alongside.
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There's a bit of weirdness to crashing your testing framework because of a syntax error. "Okay, which one crashed, and why? Oh, we messed up that syntax, lololol"
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It's so much cheaper to make coffee at work, EVEN if you're making coffee for everyone else, too. If I leave the money in the can, I've still come out ahead.
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