Rhyme Harder: an alternative pair-programming provocation
At March’s try{harder} Level Up conference, we did our usual day of code-retreat style pair-programming.
The intent is to pair for around an hour at a time with a number of different partners. All code is thrown away at the end of each cycle, because the focus is on process and reflection, not progress. At the start of each cycle you begin again on the problem, as if the code you’ve written previously had never been written.
Whether or not you should keep the understanding you gained is a more complex question; it’s impossible to unlearn, but by cycle 6 you’re generally pretty certain that what you learned in cycle 1 was not that useful after all.
Pairs can vary language and approach – we used Ruby, Python and AS3 – but there’s an emphasis on some kind of test-driven process. Test-driving can happen through conventional TDD, BDD or – our favourite at try{harder} – “TDD as if you meant it”, in which all production code is written in the test case.
We like the “TDD as if you meant it” approach because it forces you to defer committing to a definition of the solution in terms of classes, and we find that the code we write is often very different from the code we expected to write at the start of each session.
Why change the exercise?
In the past we’ve used Conway’s Game of Life as the provocation. It works well, but in some ways it feels too meaty (especially in AS3) – offering so much scope that it’s easy to vary sessions simply by shifting between the domains of the problem (the rules, the display, rendering, cycle controls and so on).
For the purposes of reflecting on tdd-fundamentals, clean code, method and variable naming, and so on, the provocation-problem chosen is almost irrelevant (provided it can be understood and held in mind without taking up too many attention slots). We were all set to use Conway’s Game of Life as usual, when, during a seminar about ‘hard to test’ code, we stumbled upon a smaller problem that led to the opportunity to reflect in more detail on the “assumptions and understanding” axis of test-driven programming. We’ve nick-named the problem “Rhyme Harder” and it goes a little something like this: Continue reading »
try{harder} Level Up: sponsored by JetBrains
Great news! I’m dead chuffed to be able to announce that JetBrains are sponsoring try{harder} Level Up.
Thanks to JetBrains, all participants will get a full Personal License for IntelliJ IDEA 11, which would normally set you back £155.
Can’t code withoutJava IDE with advanced HTML/CSS/JavaScript
editor for hardcore web-developers
try{harder} Level Up is a collaborative-learning conference aimed at mid-to-senior developers with a background in ActionScript. It’s taking place next week – 19th to 23rd of March, in Nottingham, UK.
try{harder} Level Up is a residential course – you’ll be sharing a luxury lodge with other participants, and the freelance-discount price of £699 (reduced from £1300) includes accommodation and some food, so your only other costs will be transport, beer money and dinner.
Numbers are limited to 16 – 8 try{harder} Mentors, including the people who brought you Robotlegs and Swiftsuspenders, and 8 new participants (one of them could be you!).
We only have a handful of spots left, so get in fast!
Continue reading »
Freelancers: try{harder} Level Up, £600 off!
Newsflash: The price for freelance attendees of try{harder} – Level Up will now be £699.
How? The mentors originally agreed to do the conference for a nominal sum to cover expenses plus one day of pay, but in the interests of making try{harder} – Level Up accessible to more freelancers, we’re now running the conference on an expenses-only basis.
Although there’s only a week and a bit to go, we expect that at this price those last places will go fast – so, if you have an opening for the week of the 19th March and you don’t want to miss out, get in touch now. (Hell, make an opening for the week of the 19th!)
The winter try{harder} 2012 will be the first week of October, but at present there are no slots at that conference available – all of the original group from 2011 have said they’d like to keep their place in 2012. So this is the only opportunity for newcomers to experience try{harder} in 2012.
Should I really invest in flash-based learning, now?
If you’re thinking of shifting away from AS3 as your primary platform, Level Up couldn’t be more suitable:
Till Schneidereit (Swiftsuspenders) has been working in JavaScript for some time, and as he’s also now helping Mozilla to develop FireFox, he can blow your mind with the latest live-debugging / rapid-prototyping tools available for JS.
Plus, most of the mentor sessions are platform neutral, and many are geared towards our current development climate:
Till Schneidereit: Project Forensics
How to detect the clues that allow you to make changes in someone else’s codebase, fast.
Shaun Smith: Robotlegs 2
Architecting for extension.
Stray: Fluent code
Creating DSLs, fluent APIs, helpful builders and meta code, with examples in AS3, php, Ruby and JavaScript.
David Arno: You can be a polyglot too
How to efficiently analyse and adopt new programming languages.
Michal Wroblewski: Maximizing performance in mobile games
You’ll learn that optimizing performance on desktop and mobile require different strategies. Covering rendering options including the latest AIR SDK 3.2 possibilities and also which gaming frameworks will help you achieve this. Prepare for a ‘tricks&tips’ intensive presentation.
Robin Wilding: Maximising developer flow
Angela Relle: How useful are your user stories?
Bonus offer: Come to try{harder} – Level Up and get a free ticket to btplay
We’ve got one btplay conference ticket to give away to the next person to sign up for Level Up who wants to attend both.
The btplay conference: Play, Beyond Tellerand, is 25th – 26th April, 2012, in Cologne, Germany.
I’m speaking at the conference and also running an AI workshop on Building Intelligent Applications (Workshops are not included in the standard ticket we’re giving away).
After flash: who are ‘we’ now?
First up – the most exciting news: we’ve managed to secure some sponsorship for try{harder} Level Up, that will reduce the price for freelancers (including those already signed up). If the cost is what was holding you back, get in touch – there’s only 10 days to go! More info coming very shortly – we’re just finalising details, but I’m taking names who are interested.
But that also brings me right to the point: describing try{harder} has become much more difficult since the Adobe ‘incident’ in November.
The original strap-line, “collaborative learning for flash-platform developers”, now feels like it weighs us down. That flash-platform is being eroded daily – we’re stuck in our very own 2D adventure game, and the ground is breaking up around us. Perhaps it’s on fire in some places… with particle effects and everything! Can’t do that in HTML5 can you? Oh… but… anyway…
We will always be flash developers
Regardless of what tech we’re building our projects in tomorrow, if you and I have both spent three, or five, or even ten years building projects that were anchored by whatever incarnation the flash player was in at the time, that experience changed us. Our brains have been physically moulded by that process. We can’t un-make those connections. Continue reading »
“Building Intelligent Applications” workshop: to pair or not to pair?
I’m really excited to be speaking and giving a workshop at the Play / Beyond Tellerand conference in Cologne, April 24th – 27th. This conference used to be FFK, and I’m gob smacked to be among such a stellar list of speakers, and will no doubt be far too shy to speak to any of them (except Seb, who is equal parts digital-genius and teddy-bear).
My workshop is a deep exploration of the process of building smart systems that can solve complex problems. I like to think of the subject area as “Stop telling your software what to do!” Continue reading »