April 2019

TDD Pro-Tip: Design Until Nervous Optimism

TDD Pro-Tip: Before I write the first test in a new context, I usually design until I get to a state of "Nervous Optimism". A couple of days ago, I was party to some drinking geekery with my colleagues at a hookah bar restaurant dance club. It was the end of a long day, and we were unwinding and being pretty silly. My three partners in crime mobbed on "Evil Hangman", a fun little game. And I sat off to […]

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Culture Starch: We Haven’t Grasped Complexity Yet

Sitting here, listenin’ to my playlist, thinking about temporality and how it relates to the kind of geekery I want to write and talk and teach and geek about. Over the last 10 years or so, the topics deriving from systems theory, from complexity theory, and so on, have wormed their way slowly into our mental frame. Just a little, just a little, but that’s how change works. And as I read the popular accounts, as well as the folk-theory

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Plenty Of Guilt To Go Around

Who’s to blame? I notice how many folks seem to believe geeks are in charge of what software gets written in the world. When software is revealed to be immoral, I notice how reluctant they are to blame folks who are senior executives, boardmembers, or majority shareholders. The majority of working software developers who are adding code to projects are < 30yo. An actual current programmer is uncommon on the third floor and almost unheard of above that level. I

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TDD Pro-Tip: Stay Aware Of Testing Data

TDD Pro-Tip: I stay very aware of my testing context’s data, and specifically of what data is opaque and what data is transparent. Those terms, transparent and opaque, need a little explanation. Sometimes the code I’m testing doesn’t vary based on the entirety of its input. A trivial example, the function that validates the date of an order DOES NOT CARE what any other field in that order is or does. It only cares about the date field. I would

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