Third Day at Eden

(This post is part of a series documenting my apprenticeship at Eden. For more, visit the archives)

This a retrospective post, which I’m writing on Monday morning (for Friday). On Friday I finished most of the wiki exercise, then paired with aimee for some client work.

Wiki Retrospective

The wiki exercise was interesting, not least in learning more about testing and abstraction. I think the main flaw with my program (as it stands now) is that every action is modelled with its own Webrick servlet class. This has cost me significantly in flexibilty; if I were to do this assignment again I would write one servlet that just routes actions to something akin to a rails controller. This would have made the testing much easier, and reduced (somewhat) the level of mocking I did.

I’m quite happy with the mocking library that emerged, and found that testing interactions (as apposed to state) fits nicely with my (newbie ish) ideas about OO testing.

The other main lesson I learned was with regards to ruby metaprogramming. Whilst not as ‘flexible’ as lisp macros, I’m finding ruby metaprogramming an interesting way of thinking, because you are mostly manipulating methods on objects (and classes).

The other pleasant thing here was finding out how little code it takes to write a minimum viable testing framework. I also wrote a little rspec clone on top of my testing stuff, which was very simple to do. I didn’t end up using it, because it would have meant converting all my tests to a new format (again, after I converted them to xUnit style), and everything was pretty much finished already. Furthermore, the examples were already pretty readable, and I didn’t feel that specs would add more.

Finally, I keep on feeling spoilt by Clojure’s sequence library. There are a number of functions there that I’d love to have in ruby (partition-by would have been useful for the scoring kata, and group-by is dang useful).