Pairing Tour: Day 5

Today I got to pair with Brian Pratt. Since Brian was transitioning from one client project to another today, I got to sit in on the IPM for Brian's new project in the morning. Most of the stories picked out for the next iteration were front-end features and refactorings to prepare for a new UI design. So, in the afternoon we picked up one of the UI stories. This is a shift from my normal work, so it was a good learning experience. We had to use mock ups and a demo app as a template in which to redesign the header and footer of their website. This doesn't sound terribly complicated, but every one knows that HTML and CSS never like to play nice. We got caught up on a few styling issues throughout the day, but by the end of the day were able to successfully implement the design. I definitely learned a lot about working with designs and mock ups, as well as a few CSS caveats today. Although, one thing is for sure, I'm glad that I'm a developer and not a designer. On another note, I'm making some great progress in my refactoring of Jasmine, the BDD framework for Javascript. Over the weekend I was able to get all of the preexisting tests passing again. Now that the system is working as it was before, I believe that my next steps are going to be redesigning the internals (refactoring out the "Env" God object) and rewriting all the tests. Currently, Jasmine is tested with Jasmine. The source is used to test the source. This seemed cool to me at first, but now I'm convinced that it is a really bad idea. For instance, I can break all of the tests in the system by commenting out one line (the "describe" definition). This will essentially turn describe into a noop, leaving the system with no tests. So, I'm going to rewrite the tests without Jasmine. Also, there are some pretty nasty SOLID violations in there as well, so I would like to take a golden hammer to a few of those files. Should be fun.