Monthly Archives: February 2017

Clean Code Chapter 5-6

On chapter 6 of Clean Code, the book talk about law of Demeter and it showed an example of a code that was typed with a function that calls multiple other functions leading to an extremely confusing line of code. The fix is to separate them out into different lines with each line calling a function.  This is easier to read and have the proper formatting that is expected.

I have read and also written codes that did not have proper formatting and was a long line of calls. It was just a mess to read and I’m sure anybody afterwards trying to pick up my code will have a hard time understand my though process. It is imperative to have proper formatting to not only help yourself if you run into issue with your code, but to other people in the future that might be reading your code.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Site Title by nealw5 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder ch 5 & 6.

In this week’s chapters of The Clean Coder, Robert C. Martin talks about the importance of test driven development and ways that programmers can practice their art. Robert talks about the first time he became acquainted with TDD. Although he was skeptical at first, he soon realize that TDD had a lot more to offer than just shortening cycle time. There are three crucial laws one must follow when practicing TDD. One, You are not allowed to write any production code until you have first written a failing unit test. Two, You are not allowed to write more of a unit test than is sufficient to fail—and not compiling is failing. Lastly, You are not allowed to write more production code that is sufficient to pass the currently failing unit test. even though these laws does not guarantee perfection in any program,  It is a discipline that enhances certainty, courage, defect reduction, documentation, and design. As professional coder, it would be foolish not to follow these laws because of those benefits.

Moreover Robert explain the importance of practicing. Practicing allows us to keep our mind and skills sharpened and stay up to date. As coders, we should be excited about coding therefore, practicing should be done for the enjoyment. After all, as the author, mentions “Professional programmers practice on their own time. It is not your employer’s job to help you keep your skills sharp for you. It is not your employer’s job to help you keep your resume tuned”. We are responsible for mastering our craft and the best way to do that is practicing.  Additionally, Robert correlates Coding and martial arts with a series of activities he calls the coding dojo. In a dojo there are several activities such as Kata, Wasa, and Randori. The purpose of these activities are to synchronize the mind and the body to practice the movements and decision involve in solving a problem.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Adestin by adestinyblog and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 3: The Clean Coder

This week I read chapter 5 & 6 of The Clean Coder.  Chapter 5 discusses that it’s a good habit to write the J-Unit tests before you start to code at all.  I personally am not a fan of doing this, but this chapter taught me how much it can really help.  A quote that stuck out to me was, “I know this sounds strident and unilateral, but given the record I don’t think surgeons should have to defend hand-washing, and I don’t think programmers should have to defend TDD.”  I never have really thought of TDD as a key to programming, so this was a little weird to me.  Obviously as a surgeon it’s a known thing that you NEED to wash your hands.  However, as a programmer I don’t think it’s that known that you should write your tests before coding.  It is extremely important to make sure every single program you write has high coverage tests to go along with it.  The chapter also explained things like documentation of the unit tests.  Someone who is reading through your code should be able to look at the unit tests and see exactly what it should do.

Chapter 6 of the book discussed how important it is to PRACTICE.  I agreed with this chapter a lot more then I did chapter 5.  Practice 100% does make perfect and you need to be willing to put in your own time to be the best you can possibly be.  No one is born being great at something, you need to practice and perfect your skills to make yourself great.  As a professional, you NEED to practice and this chapter doesn’t stress that enough. “Practicing is what you do when you aren’t getting paid.”  That quote really showed me that if you ever want to be the best at something you have to willingly put in your own time.  Overall I liked reading chapter 6.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Comp Sci Blog by alexsblog13 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Reflection Week 3

We haven’t been doing too much, we just finished our first sprint and got together to talk about our reflections and how everything went and whether anyone had any problems or not. We also performed a review for each individual group member in our group and how how they performed doing the tasks we were assigned or even if they hadn’t been posting their daily scrums and quickly talked about everything we needed to cover. This helped us get a feel of how each sprint would go and helped us strengthen our scrum framework and communicate thoroughly with each other.

From the blog CS@worcester – CS Blog by Gautam by csblogbyg and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Reflections Week 3

In Week 3 of my Software Development Capstone, we finished up our Sprint and focused on doing the Sprint review and retrospective. First we rated each team member on a scale of 1 to 3 – 1 being “Needs Improvement” and 3 being “Excellent” – on how well they preformed certain things during the Sprint; like communication, completion of tasks, etc. Overall our team went easy on one another for the first round since everyone was still getting the hang of doing the daily scrums and what we defined as “commitment.”

After that we did the overall retrospective of what our team could do better on in the future and also put items on the product backlog to address in the next Sprint. Again we didn’t go too far into the retrospective since we didn’t do much work besides go over the Angular 2 tutorial and read some of the Advanced pages about Angular. We did go over small things that we wanted to put on the Sprint Backlog such as making a proper definition of “done” for the team, and also setting up a priority list so we know how long certain tasks will take.

Overall it seemed to make sense to go easy on this first Sprint review/retrospective so that all team members have a baseline for how this will go. Once we have code and actual projects to work on, our team plans to go more in depth about giving reviews for people  and also take a bit longer with our retrospective about what our team could improve on in the future.

From the blog CS WSU – Techni-Cat by clamberthutchinson and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

The Clean Coder Chapters 5 and 6

This is a review of Chapters 5 and 6 in “The Clean Coder” written by Robert C. Martin.

Chapter 5 is titled Test Driven Development. This is a development process in which you write the unit test first just enough to have it fail then you write just enough code to pass the test. You then go back and write more code then more test until the development process is completed. The author seems to be a large fan of Unit Testing saying that there is really no better way of developing, and anyone who disagrees needs to basically get over it and accept the truth. This was interesting to me because i have learned about unit testing before and from what i understood it isn’t incredibly popular. However i have not currently been in the workforce so i am now 100% sure if this is actually the case. I am actually a fan of TDD, i found it to be very fast paced and at the end you are guaranteed 100percent code coverage of code that you know works, what more could you ask for.

Chapter 6 was especially important to me, the chapter was titled practicing. The author goes on to discuss that any professional no matter what his field spends a good amount of time practicing his craft. He talks about how it is not the duty of a company to allow their employees time to practice, it is the job of the individual, a company is there to spice up your resume and it is practice that makes it so you can be paid well. Practice is something that i agree is very important to becoming a good developer and it is also something that i personally do not take as seriously as i should. He then goes on to compare programming to the practice of a martial art and discusses many types of practice such as kata. This is a small programming exercise that you can practice repeatedly so that you can become a better programmer. This will allow you to spend less time thinking about the typing and the syntax and more time thinking about the harder problem at hand. There are a large amount of resources out there for young developers to practice, one of them being Codewars which calls its practice problems kata and structures itself very similarly to the way that Martin suggested that we were to practice.

From the blog CS@Worcester – Computer Science Journal by jtassone93 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 3 reflections

This week’s learning reflections will be short as we really didn’t
do much. We finished our first team sprint and had our reflections meeting as
well as doing our daily scrums. I feel like I am finally getting used to the
whole Scrum thing and like it and believe as a team we are utilizing it well
and in the long run it will only help us get better as a team. I think that we
have had positive results so far and look forward to what the future holds for
us. I think we have good continuity and will learn a lot from each other and
about the development process this semester.

From the blog format c: /s by c-braley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 3 reflections

This week’s learning reflections will be short as we really didn’t
do much. We finished our first team sprint and had our reflections meeting as
well as doing our daily scrums. I feel like I am finally getting used to the
whole Scrum thing and like it and believe as a team we are utilizing it well
and in the long run it will only help us get better as a team. I think that we
have had positive results so far and look forward to what the future holds for
us. I think we have good continuity and will learn a lot from each other and
about the development process this semester.

From the blog format c: /s by c-braley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 3 reflections

This week’s learning reflections will be short as we really didn’t
do much. We finished our first team sprint and had our reflections meeting as
well as doing our daily scrums. I feel like I am finally getting used to the
whole Scrum thing and like it and believe as a team we are utilizing it well
and in the long run it will only help us get better as a team. I think that we
have had positive results so far and look forward to what the future holds for
us. I think we have good continuity and will learn a lot from each other and
about the development process this semester.

From the blog format c: /s by c-braley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.

Week 3 reflections

This week’s learning reflections will be short as we really didn’t
do much. We finished our first team sprint and had our reflections meeting as
well as doing our daily scrums. I feel like I am finally getting used to the
whole Scrum thing and like it and believe as a team we are utilizing it well
and in the long run it will only help us get better as a team. I think that we
have had positive results so far and look forward to what the future holds for
us. I think we have good continuity and will learn a lot from each other and
about the development process this semester.

From the blog format c: /s by c-braley and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.