The Agile Breakfast
Do you know which is the best way to start the day? It’s a fact: A good day starts with a good breakfast. Don’t you agree?
This is the reason why every Tuesday morning we, people from Devscola, buy a bunch of food full of sugar and saturated fats and eat it while making what we like most: Coding. And this nutritional heresy received the name of Katayuno.
Katayuno is a combination of the words ‘Code Kata’ and ‘Desayuno‘. It is an event during which we sharpen our programming skills using code katas and Agile and XP methodologies, like pairing, TDD and code reviews.
But, what does ‘Agile’ and ‘XP’ refer to?
Pair programming
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Pairing is a practice where two developers work together in the same computer. We can imagine it like a ride in a car: The driver manipulates the steering wheel and uses its driving skill, while her companion guides and supports her.
In the same way, during pairing, the driver uses the keyboard and writes the code, while the navigator guides her.
Continuous Integration
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Continuous integration is the practice of regularly and very often merging the code generated by the teams on a project. And when I say ‘very often’, I mean several times each day.
Timebox
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Meetings
How many times have you entered a meeting thinking ‘oh my god, this will take hours. I have no idea around what time this meeting will end.‘ Many of us experienced this situation before.
Code review
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The word review means evaluate, revise, analyze. This cats for instance are making a food review:
Retrospective
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The retrospective is a meeting during which the team discusses about the last three or four weeks. This is a conversation about factual subjects surrounding our work as a team. What did work? What did not work so well? What can we improve?
Code it yourself
This post was titled after a talk I gave to people attending a course to learn how to develop software. One of the main purposes of my talk was to prevent wrong ideas about what software development really means.
In the past (and nowadays), the industry has considered programmers as ‘coding monkeys’, like if developing software was a repetitive task, similar to assembly lines in factories. But the truth is that the work of a programmer does not consist in writing code, but in THINKING. Thinking solutions that solve problems. It is a creative and adaptive job, therefore, the methodology used for repetitive tasks does not work for software development.
Refactoring: A quick overview
Hi! As promised, here I am again with another “basic concepts for coding lovers” thing. Before proceeding, I’d like to say thank you to all the people that read my last post and gave me feedback, because you help me very much during my learning process. 🙂
Well, after this short but certainly emotive declaration, we’re getting into the matter. Today we’ll learn about refactor. Continue reading “Refactoring: A quick overview”
SOLID principles
I’m applying for a job in a frankly interesting company, so I’m reviewing all the good programming practices I was taught and learned during my career. Those are essential for developing good code, however an alarming number of “programmers” don’t really understand them (or actually never heard about them).
Refactor to MVC
Hi! It’s been a while since my last post. My live has changed so much! I finally left my dryasdust work at a large IT consulting company, and got another job at a small Dutch company. Dutch people rock! I changed my job, I changed my house, I lived all new kind of experiences in different countries… And I also changed my mind! Now let’s code again!