Clean Coder Chapters 11 and 12

This is an interesting chapter. I have been in many different types of high pressure situations, some that required in the moment think on your toes stuff in the military and other just plain old the boss or company wants this and wants it yesterday type stuff, but to be honest I have never given it much thought as far as what I do in or out of crisis. I like how he keeps hammering home to not make commitments you cannot keep though, that will cause a crisis for sure. A good bit of his points are in my opinion common sense ways to avoid unneeded pressure. Keep your code clean, keep your system and design clean etc., but others I had never given thought to, especially in th crisis part where he says, “You know what you believe by observing yourself in a crisis.”, so true. Thinking back on my life and some of the situations I have been in I have thrown out the norm of doing things and switched to a whole new set of rules, but I think in some cases that needs to happen. I do agree though that in this field you should stick with what works for you in and out of crisis as there should be no need to change how you do things as long as you have a system that is efficient and clean.

 

He gives some great tips that should be lived by, don’t panic, communicate, rely on your discipline, and get help. Those are great tips and I like. I mean I guess it is easier said than done, but practicing these things outside of crisis will make you handle them better. The biggest pieces of advice I could give from this and he says also is “SLOW DOWN, COMMUNICATE, and get HELP!!”. There is nothing worth a heart attack or stress related illness over a job. Calm, cool and collective they say. Communication is huge and goes hand in hand with the get help part. Speak up, don’t be afraid to ask questions or for help, this isn’t grade school and no one is going to blow you off or laugh at you. I think the best tip is avoid pressure if you can.

The more of the book that I read the more I think it grows on me in a way. I see so much of what he has gone through in my own life and the trials I have endured. It fascinates me that no matter what industry you are in, it seems like you run into the same scenarios or strategies. I know this chapter is about collaboration and I agree with him in that working together as a team is usually better than by yourself no matter how much you think working alone may be better for you. In my opinion the more heads the better off you are to an extent. I mean of course the people on the team have to have a similar mindset and all striving towards one goal, but as long as that is the case things usually go a bit better. The team keeps itself in check and egos are hard to get in the way. I do get though that most of us computer guys and gals are geeks and don’t work well with others in a normal sort of way (whatever the definition of normal is) but we do however work together well with one another I think. Like he says though, there are of course times when it is right to work alone and that is fine, but I like his idea of it being best to collaborate with others and pair a large fraction of the time.

Week 4 Reflections

Ok so I think that I have learned a bit this sprint as a lot of things were new to me. I think the first thing is it feels like the Scrum side of things is finally rolling to where it actually makes sense to me and I can see the benefits of it now that I am putting it to use. I like how it all works and it helps to keep me organized and on track. It feels good to be putting the tools of the trade to use. Aside from the Scrum side of things I have learned a lot about Angular and the project we will be working on. I am still finding it challenging as I have never used Angular before and am really not familiar with Javascript aside from the basics and I feel like that it is making it harder for me to grasp not knowing it ahead of time. I am having to not only look up Angular stuff, but also referring to J.S. docs as well. It isn’t hindering me that much just a bit more work than I had originally thought.

I was excited to get the OpenMRS standalone running, thanks to some of the other classmates help with code that needed changing, but it was definitely a great feeling. I didn’t have much of an issue getting it up and running. The NG2-amrs build was a little more frustrating to get up and running. I spent a good deal getting help from classmates as well as the README (who would of thought that would be helpful right?) but I did get it going and did cartwheels. A bit was stupid mistakes and not taking a break when I should have, but that is part of the learning process. Come to find out, that was the easy part so far.

I am now actually into the code, well the login/auth code side of things and digging into the meat and potatoes of what we will be working on. The goal up until now was to re-write the auth/login module to get a better understanding of how Angular works and how Ng2-amrs login is working. We as a team ended up breaking the story down into smaller more manageable tasks so it wasn’t so overwhelming. Initially we had committed to re-writing the whole module on one card, but split into re-writing the HTML/CSS component first then digging into the actual auth/routing side of things. That made life a bit smoother for me. I basically copied the HTML/CSS taking note of things that I didn’t grasp, such as the Angular additions (I have a good understanding of HTML/CSS). The challenge is in the writing of the actual Angular. I had to do a lot of peaking at the original code as well bouncing back to DOCS/README/Tutorials and other help sites, but got it done. I am still far from fluent and need a lot of help I think to further my understanding, but I am persistent and have more help than I could ask for and am not afraid to ask. That is why we are here in the first place. I am still not 100% up to par on the RESTful architecture and routing but I am getting there. The more I am exposed and the more I write and do the more comfortable I am.

I guess to wrap it up for this Sprint, I have to say I am pleasantly pleased so far and look forward to what is to come and to see how my blog grows and I grow in the process. I am looking forward to learning more about the Ng2-Amrs project and collaborating with other developers via the MRS wiki and forums and digging into the issue tracker on the JIRA server (another thing I know zero about and am looking forward to learning) and just how everything fits together. It is great actually seeing the process unfold and learning new things. Until the next learning reflection blog…..

Clean Coder Chapters 9 and 10

Chapter 9: Time Management

This is a very interesting chapter as everything revolves around time and it is something that we never seem to have enough of am I right? Of course I am. I myself have been trying for years to come up with some sort of consistence as far as a schedule goes, but with my situation up until I started with college was different as I am on disability so I tried to keep to a regular schedule so I didn’t get caught in some weird time continuum while I figured out my next step. I have found it difficult to manage time while in school though and try to set a schedule, but each semester that changes and well I get out of sync. Thank goodness this is the final semester (well until grad school if I go that route) and I will hopefully be gainfully employed shortly thereafter. Anyways I suppose I should get back to the chapter at hand, time management. I found it amusing how he referred to meetings as necessary and huge time wasters because it is so true no matter what your job is. I never gave much thought about how much per person it actually costs for a meeting. There are a lot of good points in the chapter concerning meetings in general, but a lot of it is in my opinion common sense. Have and agenda and a goal. Well of course there is an agenda and a goal, I know there are a lot of times where meetings don’t seem to have either but there generally is. I really like the stand up meeting like we are suppose to do for Agile development. Twenty seconds per question, no more than a minute per person; in, out, done the way it should be in my opinion. Short, sweet, and to the point I say. No beating around the bush. I liked his quote from Kent Beck, “Any argument that can’t be settled in five minutes can’t be settled by arguing.”. Awesome words of wisdom. There are a decent amount of items in this chapter I really enjoyed, especially how he compared stuff to D & D type games, like focus manna, if you use up all your focus manna in the meeting, you’ll have none left for coding, how very true indeed.

Time Boxing and Tomatoes. I am definitely going to give this a shot. I think it is a really great idea to set a timer and let nothing interfere with your plan, actually carrying out to a tee may be a different story but still worth a shot none the less. I love it; dividing your time between tomato and non tomato time. I am actually laughing right now thinking about it, how many tomato’s did you get done today Jim?  Only 15, slacker! Over all I thought this chapter was well done and a very important, if not one of the most important things that needs to be worked out. If you can’t learn how to manage time effectively and overcome adversity when something hinders your plans, you will have a hard time getting things done and you will probably find yourself moving out of a job versus up in the job.

Chapter 10 Estimation:

I really like how he put it right out there in the first sentence. “Estimation is one of the simplest, yet most frightening activities that software professionals face. So much business value depends on it. So much of our reputations ride on it. So much of our angst and failure are caused by it. It is

the primary wedge that has been driven between business people and developers. It is the source of nearly all the distrust that rules that relationship.”

He hits the nail on the head as far as what an estimate is and how they are interpreted differently. As commitments and guesses. In reality an estimate is just a guess at when you think you will be done, however they are never set hard in stone, but the issue is that the business man hears oh it will be done by such and such date, great. I mean there really isn’t much that I have to say on this chapter other than when I give an estimate, I try and be as clear as possible and look at all the facts and take in all the information that I have and add on some extra time just in case it falls through. I also make sure that I communicate if anything isn’t going according to plan and adjust accordingly. There were a lot of great techniques he described, but I think it is something that has to be learned by doing, and by making mistakes.

Clean Coder Chapters 7 and 8

Chapter 7 Acceptance Testing

Chapter 7 hit home for me in ways unrelated to programming as a lot of stuff seems to be for me lately. It seems no matter the jobs I have done, there seems to be a lot of similarity between them. I am probably only going to hit on a few points that struck me in this chapter. The first was his co-worker wanting him to show him how to script something and Bob ended up writing the whole thing calling himself the tool while his co-worker was the sculptor who had soon lost interest or realized that what he initially wanted to do himself was actually harder than presumed. I find that this has happened to me in the past and I have been on both sides, the sculptor and the tool. I t is pretty cool to me how different areas of expertise seem to have similar issues, just different ways of solving them is all, a different tool set if you like.

His take on premature precision is spot on as well. I like how he put it it, “Business people want to know exactly what they are going to get before they authorize a project. Developers want to know exactly what they are supposed to deliver before they estimate the project. Both sides want a precision that simply cannot be achieved, and are often willing to waste a fortune trying to attain it.” That is beautiful and 100% true. Everything always looks better on paper as he says and once the final product is out there is usually some well I wasn’t really expecting this or that or I thought that it was suppose to be or do this. I do like his take on low precision requirements for estimates as that is exactly what they are estimates and to include error bars with them. I think there should be no surprises when writing up an estimate or planning out work for a customer or boss and that things should be made as clear as possible. It isn’t 100% perfect, but what is?

The Definition of Done is another good one. What exactly is done and how do you define it? I like his answer, “all code written, all tests pass, QA and the stakeholders have accepted. Done.”. That is for sure a good definition of done, but I think that done can be defined in many ways depending upon the project you are working on. It could be all steps are done for an iteration or a portion of said iteration possibly and I believe that each team or work environment should make their own definition of done with the possibility of even modifying it if need be.

I think out of all of the chapters so far this one has given me the most value as I think that a lot of this I will end up putting to practice in some way or another. Automating acceptance tests to save time is crucial and to facilitate communications between both parties and how to eliminate communication errors. It isn’t always going to work in all cases but I think there is a lot to learn here for me.

Chapter 8 Testing Strategies

I am not going to ramble on about every detail here as I think this has been covered and will continue to be covered until it is second nature I would hope anyhow. It seems like TDD is the way these days, at least for some and I agree that it is extremely, if not the most important part of the job. I understand that the code has to be written but if it doesn’t perform like it should then what good is it. I think the parts about QA should find nothing are great and that if they do it should be an extreme surprise. That means you did your job. I think or hope where ever I end up landing a job that they put a good amount of time and effort into testing. I really don’t have much experience in testing as the pyramid is laid out, I have only really done unit testing on a microscale basis, but for sure can see the benefits as you move up the pyramid. I thought the “Bug Hunt” day was a pretty cool way of testing the product as it gives everyone incentive to find bugs and ensure that the software is performing to standards.  

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.

Clean Coder Chapters 5 and 6

Clean Coder Chapters 5 and 6

Chapter 5:

I have to say that I enjoyed these two chapters, I think in part because they are on stuff that I need work with and don’t have too much experience in them, well the test driven development (TDD) anyways. I find it interesting reading about coding experience from someone who has been coding since punch cards and to see how much the skill has evolved. I used to have a Commodore 64 and was familiar with the Apple 2 machines and programming in Basic. It is awe inspiring to see how much the languages have grown and power of systems increase since then. Well back on subject and TDD. I do not have really any experience outside of some TDD examples I have done for class and reading about it, but I can see how it can be great. I think it may be hard for me to get used to as though it makes sense to me in theory, putting it to work in practice is another story. I like the 3 laws of TDD and imagine it is going to take some getting used to writing tests before writing any actual code, and sticking to it. I can see the benefits for sure. The thing that I like is that it seems to force you to write smaller parts of the whole and in the end you end up with not only a bunch of smaller modules, but you also have the tests to go along with them and the confidence that what you have will work. The other plus is that when you add code or update, you are only doing it to smaller parts of the whole so it is easier to track the bugs when something does break I would think. It is crazy that his FitNesse program takes only 90 seconds to run and has 90% test coverage with only 17 bugs in his list. That there seems to me like proof in the pudding on TDD. As I said before, this is something I will have to work on and gain confidence with and take his advice on courage. I really like the statement, “When you have a suite of tests that you trust, then you lose all fear of making changes.” For now, I will just work on following the three laws of TDD.

Chapter 6:

This chapter’s subject in my opinion is so very important, practicing. He hits the nail on the head here. You can’t better if you aren’t practicing your art. I certainly need more of it and don’t do enough, but I am working on it and I plan on using some of the techniques in this chapter to help with that. I enjoyed how he puts it together with martial arts terms. I will be working on the Katas that he linked and other items. I don’t really think that I can write a whole lot about practicing as I think it speaks for itself. Without practice you get stale and lose your touch. I really like some of his ideas on picking a new language to practice with and finding an open source project to work with. I believe that all of these ideas will help to make me a better programmer as long as I put them to work and keep up what I have been doing. I am passionate about this and sometimes feel like I am behind the curve, but I just keep plugging away and learning more every day.