Pairing Tour: Day 3

Today I continued my pairing tour with Steven Degutis. I worked with him on a client's Rails app. However, this particular client has a very interesting setup with their application. They have brought service oriented architecture to the Rails world. Their application is actually multiple applications communicating with each other via HTTP requests. This may sound pretty messy, but they have managed to isolate the service calls into gems, which are managed and tested on their own. So each service (i.e. Rails app) has its own gem that wraps all the HTTP calls so that the user of the service is none the wiser. This really doesn't seem to bad. However, in practice it hasn't turned out so well. The have experienced some pain in adding features to the services. Adding a feature to a services means updating all of it's clients as well. This is not an inherent aspect of SOA, but it is a sign that they have broken the Common Closure Principle. They are starting to see that many of these separate modules all change together, which means that they should be kept together in the same package. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to solving this problem. Bring the clients and services together into the same package is going be very difficult, especially since both clients and services are Rails apps. So, I definitely learned a lesson about the CCP today. On another note, pairing with Steven was a fun time. He is very discipled. He sticks to his principles well. And, he is very fast. I don't think I have ever seen anyone type and maneuver around Vim like he does. I definitely leaned a lot by pairing with him. I'm not pairing with a Craftsman tomorrow, because it's Friday, so I get to work on some Open Source stuff. I've been interested in Jasmine, the BDD framework for Javascript lately, so I'm planning to work on that.

Pairing Tour: Day 2

Today I had the opportunity to pair with Mike Jansen on some client work. He is currently working on a Rails app with some heavy client side Javascript via Backbone.js. We worked on a mix of bug fixes and new stories. Most of the bug fixes were in the Javascript code, while the new stories were in the Rails app, so I got to work on a variety of interesting stories. However, I didn't get to work on any Backbone code. In general, I'm a fan of client side Javascript frameworks and I like the way the our client is using Backbone in their app. I believe it has awarded them with a really rich UI. The Rails app I worked on today was nowhere near as large as the app that I worked on yesterday (1,500 specs vs 15,000 specs). This made a large difference in development feedback and turn around. We were able to fix a bug in the morning, push it to the CI server, and QA gave us feedback with in a few hours. Another plus was that we were able to run the entire test suite (acceptance + unit) locally. Even though this is better than having to wait 45 mins to get feedback from the CI server, it still took 5-10 minutes to run the suite. I think I'm starting to get a more clear picture of the dream world I have been living in the past few months of only Clojure development. The only thing limiting the feedback time on those projects was the JVM boot up time (~3 secs). At any rate, I'm grateful that I have been able to get a better understanding of what development will be like on client projects. Continuing my theme from yesterday about developer's personalized environment, I noticed that Mike has a very similar setup as Eric, besides that he uses MacVim, which is fortunately very easy for Textmate users like myself to pick up on. I'm starting to see that the Craftsmen at 8th Light really take ownership of their environments and customize them so that they can work as fast as they can. I'm hoping to take note of what other Craftsmen are using a start personalizing my environment a little more, albeit cautiously with version control. Tomorrow, I am off to pair with Steven Degutis on some more client work. Should be fun!

Pairing Tour: Day 1

As part of my Apprenticeship, I get the pleasure of going on a pairing tour with four 8th Light Craftsmen. While pairing, the Craftsmen will be working on client projects, so I will gain some exposure to our current clients and an idea of what client work is like. This also gives me a great opportunity to learn from the Craftsmen I will be pairing with. The tour also gives a few Craftsmen some exposure to me, which will allow them to evaluate me fairly at the end of my apprenticeship. Today marked my first day pairing with a Craftsmen, Eric Meyer, whom I met with at a client office. We worked on two interesting stories that kept us busy all day. A few things a took away from the day. 1) Eric really takes ownership of his development environment. He was able to navigate around his system very quickly. He has lots of bash aliases set up. He has even set up a special windowing system. Recently, I made a conscious decision to avoid extravagant customization of my development machine because it makes context switching (changing machines, pairing on someone else's environment, etc...) a lot harder. I want to stay flexible with my set up. However, after watching Eric today, I'm starting to rethink that decision. 2) Continuous Integration servers (done right) can be pretty sweet. The CI server at the client had a lot of cool features, such as testing a branch based on the branch name, testing and then merging branches automatically. However, the downside to the really cool CI server is that it takes 45 minutes to run the test suite (Ouch!).  This makes it hard to get instant feedback. Yet another example of why Rails needs to be contained. 3) The client we were at had a really cool talk over lunch today about reusing client and server code via node.js. It was extremely intriguing. It looks great in theory and I would love to build an application to see how well it works out in reality. Hopefully someday soon.