Personal

One year ago...

Michel Grootjans — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 21:11:24 GMT

I was in awe before the master himself. A week of absolute code bliss with Jean-Paul Boodhoo. It has really been a life changing experience. I know it has changed me and the way I look at code. My focus has changed radically. I now find myself being a nag with team members. Make it work first, then make it as humanly readable as possible. Or maybe it shoul dbe "Make it as readable as humanly possible"...

I just read the five blog entries I wrote back then, and I'm amazed at the endurance that was required during the course. This was intended: "You only learn when you step outside of your comfort zone". I remember feeling tired on the second day, sleepy on the third, and a real zombie before the end of the week. More than 80 intense work hours squeezed into five exhilarating days.

I remember meeting a bunch of great like-minded people. I can't really say we keep in touch, but I regularly hear about some of them that are active members of the community. I read their blogs, and I hope they sometimes glance my way.

If you ever get a chance of following a nothin' but .net bootcamp, DO IT! No excuses, no lame explanations, just do it.

Gmail was down, so what?

Michel Grootjans — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:19:01 GMT

Gmail was down a few days ago. That's a big deal, right? Or was it?

Shamelessly reproduced from http://www.modelmetrics.com/reidcarlberg/four-reasons-i-dont-care-that-gmail-went-down/. It's a bit outdated with this recent outage, but the idea behind the post renders exactly how I feel about it.

Gmail experienced an outage in Europe overnight. There’s some handwringing and frustration about it. But you know what? I don’t care. Here’s why.
1. The last significant Gmail outage looks to have been in August. Four months ago. My old email provider, which cost about $25,000 more per year than our enterprise Google account (which includes a whole lot more), used to “have some issues” (as we put it) about once every four weeks.
2. Google’s Gmail ops team is working on this. Correct that – they worked on it and it’s already fixed. I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to submit a ticket. I didn’t have to call. I didn’t have wonder if anyone else was having the problem. It’s fixed.
3. No matter what the problem was, I’m not going to have to go out and buy a new server or install a patch. I’m not going to have to do anything other than wait a few minutes and try again. Awesome.
4. No matter what the problem was, I’ll bet you $100 I didn’t loose any data and that you didn’t either. The sum total cost of the problem was inconvenience. Although that can feel significant, it’s so much better than incurring substantial actual real dollar costs.
So that’s it. Gmail is back up and all that’s left to do is complain. But I’m going to ignore the complainers on this one. This is definitely no big deal.

Speaking at XP days in november

Michel Grootjans — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 21:14:26 GMT

Yippee, I will be speaking at the upcoming XP days in Mechelen. This is a first for me, and I'm really excited about this.

Pascal Mestdach and myself have submitted a session on Agile Acceptance testing with FitNesse. It just got approved.

Isn't this sad?

Michel Grootjans — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:23:22 GMT

I was just browsing around and stumbled on this nice site called www.mysterytopia.com. It lists different categories of mysteries, ranging from the classic ancient mysteries to space and astronomy. The first page I hit was "It's official: cows point norht". That's when my eye caught the Belgian flag in the ads rectangle.

I realized this was a live traffic feed telling the world who was watching the site at this time, and that I was on top sporting "Vilvoorde, Brabant: It's official: cows point north". Silly really, until I realized what the favorite topic was of US/Canadian viewers.

Sharing book experiences

Michel Grootjans — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 10:45:05 GMT

Bart Deleye pointed me to this nice site called Shelfari. This site allows you to share the books you've read, the books you liked, ratings, reviews, ...

I know this has been done before. I just liked the application's smoothness. Visit shelfari and tell me if you liked it. My bookshelf can be found here: http://www.shelfari.com/o1518045977

I also have this bookshelf widget on the side of my blog.

Refactor your wetware

Michel Grootjans — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 21:30:13 GMT

I preordered a book from the Pragmatic Programmers on a whim. Back then it was called "Refactor your Wetware". I regularly got PDF updates through my email. Now it finally came out, and I'm reading it with much pleasure.

Although it talks about the development process, this is a not a technical book. You are used to working with software and hardware, but what about your wetware - your own brain?

In this book you'll learn how to:

Use the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition to become more expert

Leverage the architecture of the brain to strengthen different thinking modes

Avoid common "known bugs" in your mind

Learn more deliberately and more effectively Manage knowledge more efficiently

Software development happens in your head, not in an editor, IDE or design tool. It's time to take a more pragmatic approach to both thinking and learning. It's time to refactor and redesign your brain.

Just to whet your appetite, I'll quote the start of the first chapter.

Back in the early 1980s, the nursing profession in the United States faced problems similar to the problems programmers and engineers face today. Here are some observations that ring true for both nurses and programmers, and probably other professions as well:

Nurses were often disregarded as a mere commodity: they just carried out the highly trained doctor's orders and weren't expected to have any input on patient care.

Because of pay-scale inequities, expert nurses were leaving direct patient care in droves. There was more money to be made in management, teaching or the lecture circuit.

Nursing education began to falter: many thought that formal methods of practice were the best way to teach. An overreliance on formal methods and tools eroded real experience in practice.

Finally, they lost sight of the real goal-patient outcomes. Despite whatever process and methodology you followed, despite who worked on your patient, what was the outcome? Did the patient live and thrive? Or not?

If you read that list carefully, you may have noticed that these problems sound eerily familiar. Allow me to sightly edit this bullet list to reflect software development:

Coders were often disregarded as a mere commodity: they just carried out the highly trained analyst's orders and weren't expected to have any input on the design and architecture of the project.

Because of pay-scale inequities, expert programmers were leaving hands-on coding in droves. There was more money to be made in management, teaching or the lecture circuit.

Software engineering education began to falter: many thought that formal methods of practice were the best way to teach. An overreliance on formal methods and tools eroded real experience in practice.

Finally, they lost sight of the real goal-project outcomes. Despite whatever process and methodology you followed, despite who worked on your project, what was the outcome? Did the project live and thrive? Or not?

This book is filled with this kind of pearls of knowledge. Highly recommended.

It is now called Pragmatic Thinking and Learning: Refactor Your "Wetware". This is the kind of book that makes you think about your art, and it just received its place in my list next to Code Complete and The Pragmatic Programmer and a few others.

Nothin' but .net: Day 5

Michel Grootjans — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 10:53:33 GMT

Today is supposed to be the longest day of the course. I'm wondering if that's realistic. We started a little later than usual because we're all feeling the stupor from sleep deprivation. But hey, you can only learn when you get out of your comfort zone.

Pair programming frenzy

Right now, we're driving out the domain model design, hitting it big time TDD style. JP spits out the tests. We're writing the implementation to them. There's a healthy competition amongst us. The first to make one test pass can check in and shouts 'Checked in!'. Designs coming out of this creative spree are going really fast.

After lunch we're given assignments in pairs. It's just more of the same, except that JP doesn't drive anymore, we're spewing the tests and the code. If anything, the coding pace is ever increasing. We're at version 284 on our subversion repository. We'll probably hit 300 by the evening. Just a few highlights of what we've been doing:

added extra features to our ORM
added extra features to our IoC container
continued implementing of our web application
refactored mercilessly
implemented a CI on our source
created a code generator for dumb reference stuff like table names and columns
... and much much more

All this at an incredible pace and maintaining a high code quality. The goal is to code until you drop. And that we did except for a few excursions to the Shell Shop on the other side of the street to get us a few Red Bulls. To motivate us further, we even got our "I survived JP Boodhoo's Nothin' but .net bootcamp" T-shirt. Now, at the end of the 5th and last session, it's 2:00 AM and we've almost got 340 versions on our source control, and an 80 hour workweek under our belts. I'm really gonna have trouble getting up tomorrow.

To all the attendees

I must say this has been an amazing experience. It's not every day that you get to meet like-minded professionals and get to hang out with them for a whole week. I met really amazing people. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank you again. Not you JP, I've thanked you all week. I mean everyone in the team. Dirk, Björn, Björn, Thorsten, Thorsten, Stefan, Niki, Jonas, Simon, Basti, Birgit, Bavo (in no particular order). Thank you all for the great times, the awesome conversations, the disagreements, the encouragements, the sleepless coding marathons, the ... everything. I'm really going to miss you.

Have fun spreading the word and try to keep in touch.

Dilbert's 404 page

Michel Grootjans — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:54:50 GMT

Just had a laugh over dinner about the famous Dilbert 404 cartoon.

Learning to type

Michel Grootjans — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 13:34:13 GMT

I never learned to type properly. To me, a keyboard always was a straightforward tool I used everyday, without questioning my proficiency at it.

I'm starting to realize that my typing technique is far below par.

I started looking around me recently. I noticed some developers in the team who were able to watch the screen while typing. Some of them were amazingly fast typers. This made me realize something very basic: I can't type. I always look at my keyboard while typing.Then I look up to check what I typed. I even manage to 'feel' a mistake before I see it onscreen.

I'm now reminded of an anecdote on this topic: On a login screen, I usually type 'username' - ''TAB' - 'password' - 'ENTER'. A colleague of mine was looking over my shoulder while I was doing this when he exclaimed: 'So that's what the admin password is!'. I looked up at the screen and realized I missed the TAB key. The password was typed next to the administrator username. Like George W., I managed to turn a personal issue into a major security problem.

So now I'm prepared to take action: I'm going to learn to type.

I've subscribed to an online typing instructor, and I'm going to take a few minutes every day practicing. I want to be able to type without looking at my keyboard by Christmas. Be sure to remind me of that by then!

From now on, every post will be typed with ten fingers.

Nothin but .net, here I come!

Michel Grootjans — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 14:24:00 GMT

I have enlisted to JP Boodhoo's Nothin but .net class in Düsseldorf, Germany from September 22nd to the 26th.

To quote JP:

"This is a very intense week. Your mind will not have very much in the way of downtime. Days in past courses have gone anywhere from 10 – 20 hours in length!!"

He prepared a download of several items to prepare for the course. There's a 30+ minute video where he explains step by step what you should prepare on your PC before starting the class. This includes where to download some tools he uses a lot as well as scripts for ReSharper, AutoHotkey, ...

It also includes a very small VS2008 solution, prepared with 14 failing BDD-style unit tests, but without implementation. The implementation is your homework before the class.

The implementation for the tests to pass is rather straightforward. What is interesting is the setup of the project and the BDD-style test fixtures (see illustration).

The 'Concern' keyword is an attribute coming from the bddunit.core library that matches the well known 'TestFixture' of both NUnit and MbUnit. The 'Observation' attribute is just an alias for MbUnit's 'Test' attribute. This line of testing goes a long way to express more elegantly what the requirements are. Apparently, you're supposed to write one test fixture (or 'Concern') per scenario. You can add as many 'Observations' as necessary for this scenario.

Notice the amount of underscores in the code. How does this make you feel. At first, it felt messy to me. After a while though, I realized this improves readability a lot. Compare 'ShouldReturnTheNumberOfMoviesInTheLibrary' with 'Should_return_the_number_of_movies_in_the_library'. What do you think? Even my spell checker notices the difference.

A more subtle approach to readabilty can be seen in the observation:

number_of_movies.should_be_equal_to(2)

Notice the field declaration of 'number_of_movies' in the test illustration. It's just an int. An int doesn't implement 'should_be_equal_to(int otherNumber)', does it? Extension methods really rock here.

Based on the BDD tests, an HTML report can get generated. This report contains all the test specifications that have been implemented. This could be used to communicate in a non-ambiguous way with your customer. Yeah, you wish. In my experience customers are not bothered with what they feel is too 'deep inside the code'. It can however clearly communicate intent inside the development and testing team.

A second interesting part is the setup of the project. You don't compile or run tests in Visual Studio. You run them from the command line. The build script (in NAnt) doesn't even run the solution, it runs csc (yes, that's the C# compiler) directly, specifying all *.cs files in the 'source' directory. Those of you who run big projects will appreciate the time saved by not having to compile in VS. The tests are also run from the command line. If any of the test fails, a text file will be opened specifying which test(s) have failed. Drawback: you don't get to double click on the failed test to be taken back right to it. Notepad doesn't seem to have this feature ;-)

All in all, I'm really excited to have the opportunity to take this course. Be sure to check out this blog from the 22nd to the 26th.

Side note: Can you point me to a better way to post code? I heard about 'Copy as HTML', but it's site seems to be offline.