The Gold Of Microtests: Another? Intro

Coaching, TDD, Geekery / / 3 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series The Gold of Microtests

I made the claim that m-proof, the seemingly valueless dust that microtests give us, is actually gold. Not only that, but it’s gold whose working out clearly connects to the triple focus of our movement: the made, the making, and the maker. Microtests prove that what the geek said is what the computer heard is what the geek wanted. How can such a low-seeming value really be gold? Let’s work it out, eh? The gold of microtesting comes to us […]

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The Gold Of Microtests: The Intro

TDD, Coaching, Geekery / / 2 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series The Gold of Microtests

Okay, shall we take a breather from difficult concepts and do something at least a little more concrete and geeky? And the windswept trees whisper "yessssss, yessssss". Recall that a microtest is a tiny snippet of test code, run in a separate app, that depends on a tiny snippet of shipping code. It is typically focused in its intent on a single branch or calculation in that shipping code. It is fast to write, to read, to diagnose. What does

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Difficult Concepts #2: Simple Causality In Humans Is Non-Existent

Coaching / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Difficult Concepts

Difficult Concept #2: Linear single-factor causality in shared human activity is so rare it can be safely assumed to be non-existent. "Because" is a word with astonishing power. Like most powerful things, it can lead us rapidly to joy and just as rapidly to grief. In the mechanical world, the "becauses" are primarily linear — one right after the other from A to Z — and single-factor — one thing is moved and it moves another and that’s all there

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Difficult Concepts #1: Doing, Knowing, Saying, Hearing, Learning

Coaching / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Difficult Concepts

Difficult Concept #1: With most high-skill activities, the doing, the knowing, the saying, the hearing, and the learning are all dramatically different things. That’s pretty pithy, so I better unpack it a little. Let’s take one of my high-skill activities and break it out as suggested by the headline. I routinely, multiple times a day, walk to the nearest outside place, my upstairs deck when i’m working at home, light up a cigarette, smoke it, drink from a bottle of

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Difficult Concepts #0: A Prelude

Coaching / / 3 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 3 in the series Difficult Concepts

Difficult Concept #0 There are "difficult concepts", which can provide enormous value when we explore, experience, and act through them, but which we can never bring entirely within our reach. Welcome to a new series of muses, the difficult concepts series, to which this is the prelude. As always with the muses, these are improv, and as such provisional and partial and performance. In my life, I have encountered some ideas that seem to, on the one hand, provide enormous

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GeePawing & Mentoring

Geekery, Coaching / / 6 minutes of reading

I’ve spoken of thick vs thin culture. And my earlier muse was mostly for boss-types, and I promised to do the same for non-bosstypes. But I need to pause here, and do something different. I need to talk about mentoring/coaching to create proper context. (I should pre-announce, i’m semi-lit. I doubt I could pull this off if I were entirely sober, but I doubt I could pull it off if I were entirely drunk, and there it is. I get

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Thick And Thin Culture

Coaching, Geekery / / 6 minutes of reading

What to do, what to do, around this larger topic i’ve been banging against recently: the extraordinary thinness of culture in geekery. I should say at the outset, I don’t have the answer. I don’t think there maybe even is a "the answer". And I don’t have an answer. I think there are several possible ones, but nothing in my mind at this time feels complete or well-worked out. Still, fools rush in . . . So I would at

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Getting Past Impostor Syndrome

Coaching, Geekery / / 7 minutes of reading

I wanna muse about roughly 17 things. But i’m gonna try to relate them to a single message. The additional challenge, some of u may be in a place where this message will sound like an attack. Please please believe it is not meant to be that. The message: you gotta get past this impostor syndrome bullshit. It is a nasty trick that you and geek culture are pulling, together, on yourself. Far from being "honest" and "healthy", it is

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The Correlation Premise: Redux

Geekery, TDD / / 5 minutes of reading
This entry is part [part not set] of 9 in the series Underplayed Premises

My five TDD premises stuff has been well-received over the months since I put it out, but one of them seems still very underplayed, even by many died-in-the-wool TDD’ers: the correlation premise. The correlation premise says that the internal quality of our code correlates directly with our productivity. When the internal quality goes up, productivity goes up. When it goes down, productivity goes down. All of the premises were formulated in part to undercut dangerous misunderstandings about what TDD is

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TDD Pro-Tip: Start Builders & Partial Comparators Early

Pro-Tip, TDD, Geekery / / 5 minutes of reading

TDD Pro-Tip: Prevent complex test data from spiraling out of control by going to builder & custom comparator early on. The push-to-small, coupled with SOLID, coupled with things like third normal form, all lead us to a place of wanting to compose domain objects into potentially very rich dependency graphs. A card in a address-tracking subsystem sounds at first blush like a class with about 5 simple strings in it, and we certainly start there when we first approach it.

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