Pairing Tour: Day 6

Today I got the opportunity to pair with Craig Demyanovich. The first part of the day we attended a project retrospective facilitated by Uncle Bob. The retro provided a lot of context as to the history of the project, the team members, feelings about progress and the goals of the project. Essentially, the project is a "great big redesign in the sky". They have decided that their current application is no longer meeting the needs of the business, especially in the area of extensibility. As their business has grown, there has been an obvious desire to extend their application to serve more markets are more consumers. However, the architecture of their current system isn't able to support the growth of their business. So they have decided to redesign a new one. In some ways the new system is rebuilding the old application, but in many other ways, the new system is a "platform" in which to build other applications on top of. I say platform in a very loose way, because it's not really a platform. However, they have utilized service oriented architecture with the mindset that many other applications will need to consume the business logic that they are building right now. This is intelligent way to approach the problem of future extensibility. The complexity of the SOA has caused a few pain points along the way, however, the team seems to be handle the application very well by practicing the disciplines of TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration, all of which are new to the company. The team has done a remarkable job of coming into a fresh project and practicing disciples that they did not use on previous projects. The second half of the day, Craig and I were able to work on a few stories for the application. Close to the end of the day, we ran into an issue with the Ruby Date class. Our problem was simple, we needed to check that a given date was less than or equal one year from the current date. Here was our first try.

(Date.current - given_date) < (Date.current - 1.year)

However, this didn't work at all. The expression on the left side takes the current date and subtracts the given date, with yields a Rational, representing the amount of days between them. The right hand side takes the current day and subtracts one year, which yields a Date one year ago. So in the end we were comparing a rational to a Date which blew up. Our next try was 

(Date.current - given_date) < (Date.current - 1.year.ago)

This time the right hand side takes the current day and subtracts it from 1 year ago. However, this doesn't work either because 1.year.ago yields a DateTime object as opposed to a Date object, so this blew up too. So we massaged this a little to get it to work.

(Date.current - given_date) < (Date.current - 1.year.ago.to_date)

Finally! Both sides of the expression produce a Rational object which can be compared to each other!