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Resharper Snippets for Calculator Kata

2009-10-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

So after reviewing a few peoples code I thought I'd upload a video on how to create resharper snippets, and in particular the ones I use for the calculator kata. It's my first video so be kind, this is about the 4th take.

I may well have missed some bits out so just make a comment below and I'll be sure to make a note of it in the blog.

So here it is:

Kata Snippets in ReSharper from Sara on Vimeo.

Sara ;)

FOWA – An Insight

2009-10-05T15:47:00.000-07:00

So what is FOWA? FOWA is an acronym for Future of Web Apps and is an event fun by Carsonified. It's an event that I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this year and one that gave me such a large insight into the web apps of today and tomorrow.

There were many well know tech idols that appeared at this years event, Scott Gu, Kevin Rose and Mike Butcher to name a small few. It was an intense 2 day conference of highly interesting and eye opening presentations.

All of the presentations were interesting and beneficial and I struggled to whittle them down to a compiled a list of points from those that I found particularly interesting, but here goes.

The first talk to really get me thinking was ‘Get Niche, Rich and Go Mainstream’ with David Prager. I'd always personally brushed over Niche (or was it Nitch ;)) markets thinking that there wasn't really a huge amount of revenue to be made there. Turns out I was very wrong, these are the untapped markets and it would seem the web is leaning towards this. It would make sense that the more relevant you can make your web app to someone the more likely they are to use you time and time again to get the best most suited product.

The next presentation to have my mind boggled was ‘Going Global’ with Cat Lee, the statistic that really sticks in my brain from Cat's presentation is this: Facebook was translated into French in 24 hours, yes 24 hours! That's incredible and how did they do it? They got their users to...genius. Why pay a third party or in-house employees to complete a requirement for you when you can ask your users whom are willing and eager to help. Facebook has created such a dedicated and loyal community that they want to work from them for free, this is proof of the power of crowd sourcing.

Both Kevin Rose's and Gary V's presentations left me with some points that seemed logical but one's I'd never sat down and identified before. One of those being over featuring, by that I mean giving your users too many features. Instead do fewer features well continuing to improve on those that the users love. Remember to never think you know your users, you don't. Ask them what they want - a feedback form is not good enough - get them to tell you what works for them and what doesn't, that way they feel like the contributed and contribution gives you a sense of belonging. Something like uservoice.com seems ideal.

I think my favourite presentation has to be one on Accessibility by Robin Christopherson - How to Increase the Accessibility of Your Web App. Firstly, what an amazing guy if you get the chance to see one of his presentations please go, it will be worth it. Before listening to this presentation I'd always kind of skipped over accessibility but I now realise the error of my ways! I did not realise that by making your site inaccessible you are cutting out a sizable slice of the market. If you've never put your site through a screen reader, do it (here's a free download). I guarantee it will shed a new light on the importance of accessibility.

In my opinion FOWA was a great success (despite the issues with wifi). I always find it so liberating to mingle and debate topics with such passionate, intelligent and driven people and FOWA was buzzing with just those types.

Learning the Powers of TDD and much more

2009-09-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

As Some of you may already know was lucky enough to win a place at Roy Osherove's TDD Master class. I had a fantastic time and although the learning curve I experienced was steep the topic could not have been taught in a better manner. I had jotted down a brief overview of each day's events and thought I do a brief run through.

Day One:
Day one found us getting to grips with Nunit and the concept of unit testing, naming conventions and refactoring. I discovered I was pretty bad at refactoring and I wish I'd realised how helpful it really is sooner it's incredible just how much time it saves when trying to maintain the code. Day one also exposed me to my first proper experience of pair programming. This proved invaluable to me, where before I would find myself hesitating about making a decision on how to code something all it took was a little push in the right direction and I was able to commit to the code. Don't get me wrong it wasn't always right but then I'd be shown a better way.

Day Two:
First on the agenda for day two was a pair swap, getting to work with different pairs exposes you to the different ways in which people work, I believe even if you're at the top of your game you can learn something from everyone, I my case I can learn a lot from everyone! Next we began with the mornings Kata, this went a lot quicker than the previous day but didn't even reach point 4 in the criteria with in 45 minutes let alone in 30 minutes!

We explored Nunit further and were introduced to the idea of mocks and stubs. We explored manual mocking and NMocks (not something I ever really want to explore again but I am glad I'm aware of it and makes me appreciate the other mocking frameworks a whole lot more!)

Revelation of the day was the idea of 'Mouselessness'. It is in fact liberating and if you are using ReSharper (or other similar products) and maximising the usage of short cut keys and snippets you are so much more productive. I was thinking about doing a post with my shortcut keys and asking everyone to post theirs, what do you think?

Day Three:
Day three and a new partner brings a new go at the kata. This we are much faster..well I say that but we had a "Warm up" for half an hour and then were told to start a new project all over again, this time we were much better, much quicker and even reach the beginnings of point 4! Roy insisted I focus on my refactoring on day three it's something I found hard to force myself to do, you know when you get into coding, your tests are running and you [think] you're flying...then you look at your code and "That's the ugliest code I've ever seen". Bah...must be more strict with myself. Aside from that we when through Extract and Override for testing static methods and we explored TypeMock (leagues above NMocks and SO much easier to get your head round). Day three also made me realise that using a framework wasn't ALWAYS necessary and you should assess your needs as maybe manual mocking is more suitable at times, I often find it more readable yet less maintainable.

Day Four:
Day fours kata and with a new pair we were getting serious! Much quicker this time muscle memory is kicking in right up until point 4 where thinking slows us down but we get more of the way through than last time. Roy also told us to try completing the Kata on our own so that we had experienced what it was like to be back at work minus a pair. We spent the rest of day four going through mocking with Rhino Mocks and Moq, the benefits and downfalls and what to watch out for.

Day Five:
The final day and final pairing, kata was the fastest yet and had we had five more minutes I'm sure we would have met the criteria. So I've taken it back to work and am determined to meet the criteria sub 30 minutes. The rest of day five was spent doing test code reviews and looking at legacy code. Roy explained to us that even if we didn't know what the code was really doing we could look at a test and look for the "warning" signs of a bad test. We went through a number of projects highlighting issues and providing reasoning for selecting those as issues. At the end of the day we had a round up and went through some more specific questions people had.

Overall the course was extremely enjoyable, informative and interesting, I would highly recommend it too anyone interesting in learning TDD. If you need more infomation you can find it here.

If there is anything you would like me to expand on let me know and I can make it one of my future posts.

Going 'KATAtonic'

2009-09-28T12:13:00.001-07:00

"KATAtonic" a term I picked up from Roy Osherove whilst attending his 5 day TDD course. On completion of the course one of the things that is now to become part of my daily task list is to complete as much of the decided Kata as possible in 30 minutes.

What is the 'Kata'?
Good question, the phrase Code Kata is a term coined by Dave Thomas and derives from the concept of kata in the martial arts. A code kata is an exercise in programming which helps hone your skills through practice and repetition.

Can I have an example please?
Of course, below you will find the criteria for a Calculator code kata(produced by Roy). It will outline all the functions your calculator has to perform:

Calculator KATA:

Takes empty string and returns zero
Takes one number and returns that number
Takes 2 numbers separated by delimeter (',') and returns sum
Takes multiple numbers and returns sum
Can separate numbers when delimiter is changed \\'\n

Remember write the test first, run the tests and then do the minimal amount of production code possible to fix that failing test.

Take a look below:

[Test]
public void Add_EmptyString_ReturnsZero()
{
Calculator c = new Calculator();
int result = c.Add("");
Assert.AreEqual(0, result);
}

So the quickest way to make this test pass is:

public int Add(string numbers)
{
return 0;
}

Now obviously this won’t work for the next test but you get the picture.

This exercise will at first take you longer than 30 minutes so stop and 30 minutes and see how far you can get the next day in 30 minutes. It’s almost like a competition with yourself, eventually (if you practice a lot) you will complete the kata sub 30 minutes. Using ReSharper, keyboard short cuts and snippets serve as a great enhancement to bringing down the time.

Give it a go and let me know what you think?

Women in High Level Management – Few Opportunities?

2009-09-02T13:22:00.000-07:00

There are few opportunities for women to progress to the highest levels in IT Management. True or false?

This was the question I decided to pose, after much delibertation with my tutor, as the focal point for a 3000 word research report I had to complete for one of my year 3 degree modules. Full report here

It’s quite a question and was likely to raise a few strong points. Doing research on this topic turned out to be a rather large learning curve that I hadn’t really anticipated and it exposed me to so many different thoughts and ideas.

I arranged to interview three different subjects, all involved with the technology industry in a large way but in a variety of different roles. All of the interviews highlighted some points I’d never really considered and have posed questions that I’d like to find some answers to. Such questions as, “What are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?” and “If women are doing HE in a technology related subject and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?”

My report conclusion states that the results indicated the originally posed question to be false. There are no fewer opportunities for women in the higher levels of IT management than there are for men. On interviewing Alan Dean. He brought up that

“There are few opportunities for anyone, male or female, to progress to the highest levels of IT Management in my experience. This is largely because the top of any ladder is usually attained via dead shoes and IT management is relatively youthful”

I believe this to be true. It is not a gender based problem, the reason you see fewer women in higher levels of management in IT is simply because there are less of them to start with, it would be quite incredible to find a higher percentage of women in high level IT management roles than in the industry as a whole.

We are losing a lot of women between Higher Education and pursuing working in the sector and I am confused as to why this is happening, if they are doing HE and have seen and dealt with the fact there has been a lack of information available and that the sector is dominated predominately by males why do they then take a different career path?

Awareness of the different roles within IT is a large issue and I feel it needs to be addressed to entice females into IT. IT is perceived as being ‘Techy’ but that is not all it involves and there are some highly communicative roles within IT which until undertaking this report I myself was not aware of. So what are we doing to make all domains of IT exposed?

There does seem to be a underlying communication issue between the genders. This I believe is down to a number of attributing factors, the difference between the genders as a whole; males often perceive things differently to females and although this can create a positive impact on the productivity of a team it can cause communication issues to arise and as such I question “Do women need to be more direct when communicating or do men need to be more sympathetic in their approach to communicating with women?” “Is this just a cultural based issue or is this something that is a genetic trait of males and females?” “Do other countries have these issues?”. These would be areas I would be interested in researching further.

I think that the lack of confidence females appear to have could attribute to the communication barriers they are experiencing. The articles and interviews mentioned in this report relating to the confidence of females within the industry suggest that they feel less confident in themselves not their abilities and that they air on the side of caution, although it was interesting to find that when interviewing a male on the topic he felt women were more confident. So is this an example of communication failure or has the research just not been done on a wide enough scale?

If you are interested in reading the full report with statistics and graphs you will find it here.

TDD Masterclass in the UK - Free Ticket Raffle!

2009-08-25T02:25:00.000-07:00

Roy Osherove is giving an hands-on TDD Masterclass in the UK, September 21-25. Roy is author of "The Art of Unit Testing" (http://www.artofunittesting.com/), a leading tdd & unit testing book; he maintains a blog at http://iserializable.com (which amoung other things has critiqued tests written by Microsoft for asp.net MVC - check out the testreviews category) and has recently been on the Scott Hanselman podcast (http://bit.ly/psgYO) where he educated Scott on best practices in Unit Testing techniques. For a further insight into Roy's style, be sure to also check out Roy's talk at the recent Norwegian Developer's Conference (http://bit.ly/NuJVa).

Full Details here: http://bbits.co.uk/tddmasterclass

bbits are holding a raffle for a free ticket for the event. To be eligible to win the ticket (worth £2395!) you MUST paste this text, including all links, into your blog and email Ian@bbits.co.uk with the url to the blog entry. The draw will be made on September 1st and the winner informed by email and on bbits.co.uk/blog

The Perception of IT, What can we do to Change it?

2009-08-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

So who frequently get's the digs from their non techy friends about being a 'geek'? I do all the time, of course it's a joke but it always made me think, why is 'geek' seen as a bad thing? I've never seen it that way, you just have to look at the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Tom Anderson, Larry Page and Sergey Brin and at how much of an impact that have made on the whole of today's industry!

So I've decided that I'd like to change the perceptions some people have of IT and those that work within it. Why do I think we should change the perceptions of IT? Because it's not what it used to be, it's cool and avaliable and we should be ecouraging young people to consider a career within IT so we can constantly push our technology limits. I think there is already a change happening and I believe instead of removing the 'geek' tag we should just break down it's current definition and reform it. To do this I think we need to be addressing where the perceptions begin to be formed.

Schools, I'm not entirely sure how IT is taught in schools at the moment but I know I have seen some great teaching style programs that incorporate a game with what is essentially programming without the user even knowing. Are we using these tools and then explaining to the students how they could make programs just like those in IT? We need to make them more aware of the everyday items that use technology, like a microwave or the washing machine(granted these aren't very exciting items but you get the picture).

The other angle we could take is to make parents more aware of how technology influences our day to day life and how a career in IT is a rewarding, interesting and future shaping. I think sometimes IT is seen as simply 'working with computers', well that is what my mother describes me as doing to family and friends! How many times have you been asked if you could fix someone's computer and wouldn't really know what to do as it's not your field.

After discussing with numerous passionate tech people, I think the key things that I should be looking to address are awareness of IT and how much we rely on it every day along with the awareness of the wide variety of job roles you can have that involve IT in some form in order to adjust these perceptions.

Here's a fantastic video produced by e-skills www.itstheruddyfuture.com. I think it's extremely well produced and executed and is just the type of media that will help to break down these perceptions.

What do you think we can do to change the perceptions? What demographics should we be aiming campaigns at? How do we engage young people? Love to hear your ideas! I'd also like to know of any things that are already being done?

What makes the beginnings of a good developer? Passion or Qualifications?

2009-08-05T13:09:00.000-07:00

On the back of a previous post "Promoting IT as profession", some of the responses provoked me to ask this question. I don't mean it in the sense of what methods they apply to their programming. I mean do you need some form of education in the field or can passion and a thirst for knowledge make you a great developer?

Imagine you had 2 people for interview for a Junior position,

Candidate A
A post grad with a high level degree, a constant high achiever. They've taken the pre interview test and passed with flying colours. When posed with a hypothetical logic problem at interview they approach in the most efficient and logical manner. However when talking to the candidate they do not seem to be passionate about what they are doing, you get the feeling that they are not that interested in the area, there's no doubt they are extremely good at the technical side of things but you get the impression their input would start at 9 and finish at 5.

Candidate B
Has no formal training, they have put themselves through some online tutorials and have examples of a one or two home projects they have created. They just managed a pass on the pre interview test and when they are posed with the same hypothetical logic problem that candidate A had to address they are not as efficient. After stumbling a little and asking a few questions they manage to solve the problem but the methods are a bit untidy. When speaking with the candidate they come across as incredibly enthused about developing and show that they take a keen interest in and outside of working hours.

Both
Are good at communicating and have good references.

Who would you employ? Why?

Do the best developers have a formal qualification or are they just passionate about what they do? Is it necessary to take an interest outside of work or can u learn everything you need to while you're at work?

String @MissXXX = "Please don't follow me"

2009-07-28T15:36:00.000-07:00

This evening whilst checking my emails I came across two that were from twitter each informing me of new followers. Now I am always pleased to receive a follower as to me it symbolises that this person has chosen to follow you because they feel that you have something valuable and interesting to say and you are worth them requesting what is essentially a live update of your advice, interests and questions. It's the reason I follow the people I do, it's me saying "I think what you have to post is helpful and interesting and thank you for your taking time in your day to post it".

Many of the people I follow - who post - have given me some great advice, thought provoking questions and links to information I never knew I needed. So on investigating my two new followers I find that follower A is an asp.net developer and has some very interesting posts, this is great and I'm privileged to have them follow me and indeed return the follow. However on investigating follower B I find their most recent post to read "Come see my adult profile". I was disappointed. I don't want "Miss XXX" to be following me and why is she following me anyway? I don't want to be used as a 'porn' in her game of shameless promotion of whatever adult services she is trying to sell (I didn't enquire as to what it was). I don't want her to @reply to me about something that I do not want to be associated with (by appearing on her page as an @reply) or have no interest in. So it got me thinking how many people do you have following you like that? If they wanted my attention they don't have to be following me to @reply me, sure I'll block them, so why bother adding me to start with? Are they using me as access to people I follow or those that follow me? Or was she just adding me in the vain hope that I might be interested?

I'm aware that we can block users on twitter but how do we prevent those unwanted adds from adding us in the first place? I know I can protect my profile but I don't want to force people to follow me just to see what I have written on my account. I'm sure twitter wasn't designed to advertise adult services, that said it does have the intention of networking people so is it different when it comes to the adult industry?

I have no problem with an entity promoting services and products to me if I am following them, it's what I expect and it's what I requested and it does come in very handy. So this leads to me asking should service providing entities wait for people to follow them and then return that follow or should they go out and add twitter users 'willy nilly'? Should there be a "What will your primary use for twitter be?" and "What is your line of business?" registration question?

Does it irritate you when an entity of no interest follows you or do you just remove them without much thought?

Promoting IT as a ‘Profession’

2009-07-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

I recently posted a blog at work on Promoting IT as 'Profession' asking what my colleagues views were and what they thought could be done. This was all in aid of some research I've been doing into the topic to try and find out where I stand on this. Anyway it sparked a huge amount of interest and had people posting large bodies of text saturated with contrasting views and opinions. So I thought I'd blog about it here and pose all the questions I had after reading my colleagues posts and see what you had to say about it.

It looks like a main factor to the hindrance of 'professional' status is the age of our sector. We are still learning at a constant rapid rate, certain technologies and practices that were seen as a 'must know' 10 years ago have been virtually put down.

It was a colleagues comment about dynamism that got me thinking, So how do you impose standards and structure to a constantly evolving and dynamic industry without slowing the process down and thus hindering the advancement of technology? What form do these standards take and -as a colleague pointed out- who decides on what's in and what's not in the 'IT Bible'?

I like the idea of an organised, definitive and quantified way of doing things but I still have to ask myself the following questions:

a)Had we had standards imposed early on would we be where we are now, further ahead or stuck behind? I realise this is a divergent question and there is no real way of knowing, however posing the question could impact how we progress forward.

b)Could we have a very basic underlying criteria? Or would this just defy the point in a structure all together?

c)Do we need to have accredited qualifications that are acknowledged by all that are not necessarily entirely academic but vocational as well? How do you get everyone to accept these qualifications? And as another colleague pointed out will having to have these qualifications alienate and discourage some potentially innovative people from entering the sector?

In reply to this comment:

“If you came up with a course which spanned the full three years, and required the student to take the first line of code they write on day one, and carry it all the way through to the last day; making them take a small piece of software and evolve it gradually over the years to a finished project then you'd have a really good opportunity to teach the lessons of unit testing, refactoring and code-standards; and if you placed stringent performance characteristics on the final product then you'd also teach the lessons of how to write efficient and fast code.”

I'm not sure having a course evolving one piece of code for three years would work, I like the concept and the idea of what could be achieved but I think you'd be cutting out a lot of important material. I think it is important to look at old programming techniques and languages to get a firm understanding of how we got to where we are now, that said in some courses there is a little too much emphasis placed on abstract theories that do not apply to the real world very well and after all are we not studying so we can progress with technology in the working environment as well as feeding a hunger for knowledge?

I do think we need to have structure and standards to be a profession but I'm not sure in what forms those standards come. Can we encourage something like work ethic standards, communications standards and knowledge banding? I think IT is exciting, innovative and future defining, it will change the world and how it operates - so why should it not be viewed as a professional vocation?