06.28.08
Posted in News at 6:15 pm by Pablosan
I am a huge Pixar fan, so my family and I headed out today to see Wall•E. I found it quite ironic (some might even say hypocritical) that, with it being such an obvious Save The Planet movie, they were handing out “Happy Meal” toys (read: landfill fodder) to all the kiddos (they even advertise that at the bottom of the official Disney site linked above): little packets containing several cards advertising another movie, and a thick, laminated card that was holding a plastic, rubberized “Limited Edition Wall•E Watch.” Can you say “double standard”? I knew you could.
It really is a great movie, though. Pixar hasn’t disappointed me yet.
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06.22.08
Posted in News at 1:59 pm by Pablosan
I figured since I’ve had this domain for several years now it’s about time to have a home page. Whenever I look at my stats there are usually a couple attempted hits for http://salientblue.com so I’m at least missing an opportunity to point people to this blog. That, and I’ve had a couple people ask me why there was nothing there.
Watch out, though; the page contains a scary picture!
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06.16.08
Posted in Agile, Pair Programming, TDD at 1:47 pm by Pablosan
Pair Programming is taught as an integral part of my TDD class. I emphasize two, further refinements of the practice: Promiscuous Pairing [PDF], and Ping-Pong Pairing (P3). While pairing with a good friend of mine and fellow trainer/mentor, Jeff (whose book you see to the right if you’re on my actual website), I came up with a new version of pairing: Stick-It-To-Your-Pair Programming. This is how it happened:
Once a week, Jeff and I try to get together for a TDD/Pairing session to keep our skills sharp. In the tradition of Dave Thomas’ Code Katas, we chose Jeff’s Roman Numeral Kata (do a search for “Roman Numeral Kata”, or look for his April 3rd, 2008 post). We had so much fun implementing an Arabic number to Roman Numeral converter that we decided to implement the reverse as well. Once we started the Roman Numeral to Arabic conversion exercise, we got a little goofy and started looking for the absolute simplest, silliest way to get the test to pass: essentially playing “Hot Potato” with the responsibility for actually implementing the right solution. The coder left with no choice but to actually implement the right approach loses.
We had a blast, jibing one another and laughing out loud (much to the dimay of those in cubes around us). What amazed me was that this approach isn’t just a lot of fun: it actually reinforces solid TDD principles:
- It forced us to implement the barest amount of code to get the test to pass.
- All code improvements were forced out by the existence of a failing test.
While P3 invented the approach, it took two screwballs like Jeff and I to crank it to eleven! Remember: you saw it here first. Oh yeah… Stick-It-To-Your-Pair Programming‘s gonna be big!
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